[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.