Effectively the whole article is talking about latency (mentioned exactly 1x). But sometimes high latency might be okay if subsequent events occur at a high rate (your "truckload full of SSDs" arriving after being stuck in traffic). Which is how many internal busses, IC-IC protocols, or longer-distance serial connections work.
Yeah it does mention parallelism - 2 trucks can carry more SSDs than 1 truck. Duh..
What's commonly called "speed" or "performance" is a combined (mixed) effect of the above.
kg•2d ago
> characteristic times of electronic signals are restricted by so-called parasitic capacitances, and parasitic capacitances in general are proportional to the length of the connection
> modern CPUs use so-called “dynamic branch prediction”
These two mostly served to distract me and break up the reading flow of the page, and I initially thought they had been erroneously truncated.
This next one is straight-up nonsensical because it's missing context:
> Overall, these effects seem to compensate each other, and main memory access latencies of an x64 desktop box, and an M4 Apple SoC happen to be in the same ballpark of about 200-300 CPU cycles.
Which effects?
If the author is reading this, I would advise you to either remove these, or try to be more careful about what sentences you decide to pull out in this way to make sure that they communicate something useful by themselves. Ideally something that reflects the overall theme of the surrounding paragraphs.
The illustrations attached also seem to have nothing to do with the text but that's probably not a big deal.
chmod775•1d ago
Maybe you're not used to that style, but it's pretty common in educational literature (especially for younger audiences). They're mostly navigation aids, highlight conclusions or other important tidbits, or merely exist to break up the flow so it's not just an impenetrable-looking block of text.
I remember many school books being full of these back in the day.
Some newspapers do it too, where they just place a quote from the article itself under images or just enlarged by itself, not really adding anything in either case.