Also: CPU-bound problems used to be much more common. We spent a lot of effort making CPUs fast though, and memory access didn't keep up. It's why we have these deep caches, it's why we have out of order execution and speculative branch prediction -- to keep processors fed with data.
Used to be you could count cycles, now that's only really true in the simplest of cases with trivial memory access patterns. Now high-information branches are much more expensive than cycle counting would have us believe, ditto pointer-chasing.
Used to be you could count cycles, now that's only really true in the simplest of cases with trivial memory access patterns. Now high-information branches are much more expensive than cycle counting would have us believe, ditto pointer-chasing.