[charleslmunger]

>RAM access on modern hardware has a latency of something like 10 nanoseconds

What modern hardware are you using that this is true? That's faster than L3 cache on many processors.

[sgarland]

Correction: DRAM latency is ~10 - 20 nsec on most DDR4 and DDR5 sticks. The access time as seen by a running program is much more than that.

As an actual example of RAM latency, DDR4-3200 with CL22 would be (22 cycles * 2E9 nsec/sec / 3200E6 cycles/sec) == 13.75 nsec.