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by thomaslee 3533 days ago
+1 on the date, but generally relevant to most modern x86/x86-64 hardware IMO.

(The rest of this comment is largely my own inflated opinion.)

From a developer's perspective, whether it's _useful_ when operating at a certain level of abstraction is another question. Really do think it's good to know this stuff, but if you're writing, say, Ruby or Python web apps you probably don't _need_ to know it.

Low latency/high throughput/systems-level stuff it starts to become more relevant. That said, there's certainly been operational scenarios where knowing some of this stuff can help narrow down misconfigured systems and/or squeeze more life out of existing hardware (e.g. configuring a JVM to use huge pages).