What if you could only carry things to&#x2F;from that closet in a fixed-size box?<p>Typical L1 cache size for the x86 family is only a few times larger than on the 486. Cache is getting faster, but transistor shrinkage should affect cache speed and instruction execution time in roughly equal proportion.<p>Of course, the marginal value of spending development time improving performance can vary a great deal; but when performance matters, the key considerations are going to remain location, location, and location for the foreseeable future.