[bigbillheck]

> 99% of people who are writing software have almost no clue how a CPU actually works, let alone the physics underlying transistor design.

My undergraduate education was in the early 90s, and at no point in my life have I ever had much of a clue regarding the physics underlying transistor design.

EDIT: also at one time I probably did have a reasonably solid grasp on how CPUs work, there's been an awful lot of advancement in the field over the decades, and I won't describe my understanding as anything more than a cartoon model.

[angry_octet]

For a CS person transistor design would be useless, but for EE it’s still core knowledge. But CPU design constraints are still the same now as they were in the 90s: speed of light, cache and coherency architecture, Amdahl’s law, pipelining. You’re way ahead of most coders if you understand even the basics of memory hierarchy.

[bigbillheck]

I didn't learn anything about caches, and NUMA postdates my education.

[angry_octet]

NUMA was around but it's an advanced topic. Never to late to learn about caches and memory hierarchy.