[daemin]

Actually my example is far simpler and less interesting. Having a console devkit read un-ordered file data from a local disk ends up being slower than reading the same data from a developer's machine from an SSD over a plain gigabit network connection. Simply has to do with the random access patterns and seek latency of the spinning disk versus the great random access capabilities of an SSD. Note this is quite unoptimised reading of the data.

[mmt]

Yes, that is, indeed, a degenerate case, as I suspected.

Is it safe to say that such situations are often found with embedded or otherwise specialized hardware?