One of the biggest bottlenecks in many workloads is latency. Cache miss and the CPU stalls waiting for main memory. Flash storage, even on an nvme bus is two orders of magnitude slower than ram.

For example L3 cache takes approximately 10-20 nano seconds, ram takes closer to 100 nano seconds, nvme flash is more than 10,000 nano seconds (>10 microseconds).

Depending on your age you may remember the transition from hard drives to ssds. They could make a machine feel much snappier. Early PC ssds weren’t significantly faster throughput than hard drives (many now are even slower writing when they run out of SLC cache), what they were is significantly lower latency.

As an aside, Intel and Microns 3d xpoint was super interesting technically. It was capable of < 5000 nano seconds in early generation parts, meaning it sat in between DDR ram and flash.

Gigabytes plural? Maybe a while. Gigabyte singular? Already a thing. AMD EPYC 9684X(https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9684x.html)

I never had one (but did want one, just financially couldn’t justify it at the time), but it would have a great fit for me. I just wanted a watch to tell the time, and display my phone notifications plus vibrate to alert me to them. That would have been legitimately useful for the job I was in at the time which was challenging to carry a phone (but it was nearby in my bag).

Now, I have no use for any of that. But I am now interested in a heart rate monitor that doesn’t hoover my data to replace my old dedicated Polar heart rate monitor (which also told the time, but I only wore it exercising), so the more expensive model is tempting!