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by weego 3215 days ago
Every programmer should know cpu cache read time? How many times is this going to come up. Barely anyone in the world needs to know that.
5 comments

I don't think it's that useful to know specific numbers, but knowing the orders of magnitude is important when you're writing anything even somewhat CPU intensive. It helps you understand why certain patterns of code are slower.
Biggest game changer in terms of my skills as a developer was learning to write cache friendly code ie: principal of locality/locality of reference. Even within the confines of the JVM https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/6hlpbn/techniques_fo...
Programmers don't actually have to know how computers work either, but sometimes it comes in handy.
I sense a bit of humor in your comment, but none the less its worth learning.

In the end, the CPU is the actual machine that runs the code. It's good to have an idea about how it works because it clears away a lot of the smoke and mirrors that abstract VMs use in defining their behavior.

This made me laugh. Thanks. :)