The first thing that jumps out is how absurdly fast our processors are. Most simple instructions on the Core 2 take one clock cycle to execute, hence a third of a nanosecond at 3.0Ghz. For reference, light only travels ~4 inches (10 cm) in the time taken by a clock cycle. It’s worth keeping this in mind when you’re thinking of optimization - instructions are comically cheap to execute nowadays. [...]

Normally when the CPU needs to touch the contents of a memory region they must either be in the L1/L2 caches already or be brought in from the main system memory. Here we see our first major hit, a massive ~250 cycles of latency that often leads to a stall, when the CPU has no work to do while it waits. To put this into perspective, reading from L1 cache is like grabbing a piece of paper from your desk (3 seconds), L2 cache is picking up a book from a nearby shelf (14 seconds), and main system memory is taking a 4-minute walk down the hall to buy a Twix bar. [...]

Sadly the southbridge hosts some truly sluggish performers, for even main memory is blazing fast compared to hard drives. Keeping with the office analogy, waiting for a hard drive seek is like leaving the building to roam the earth for one year and three months. This is why so many workloads are dominated by disk I/O and why database performance can drive off a cliff once the in-memory buffers are exhausted.

I never thought I'd be glad to "only" have the jet-engine CPU fan, but the horrible sound the northbridge fan developed was driving me up the wall. Yay!