[haimez]

Maybe a low latency hybrid cache & query engine where data is mostly in memory but some computation (eg: aggregation at different percentiles on the fly) with low latency requirements would benefit.

Generally speaking, something where:

1. The data is in memory or can be made to be, for the duration of the need.

2. The overall throughput isn’t limited by some external I/O operation (eg: cache servers might seem like “memory hungry” things, but will bottleneck on network throughput before memory throughput [note: latency is definitely not throughput here]). - the CPU operations involved once data is fetched from memory are very cheap, but also generate a sequential but high volume of writes. Maybe an ideal example is incrementing every integer in a large array by 1 since reads and writes are predictable and SIMD instructions can push the theoretical per clock CPU throughput even higher.

Disclaimer: I might be missing some other scenarios from a lack of creativity. The question you asked got more interesting the longer I thought about it, and I think it might have something to do with why this “Memory Bandwidth Beast” hasn’t yet had its day in the sun.