Gustavo has a great post on his blog What your computer does while you wait. It has a couple of very excellent diagrams detailing the state of affairs and some nifty work converting computer clock-cycle timings to commonly referred ones.
The comparative in question:
Going to the L1 Cache (On Chip integrated): 3 Seconds
Going to the L2 Cache(On Chip, further away): 14 Seconds
Going to System memory (Computer RAM): 4 Minutes
Going to Persistent Memory (Hard Disk): 1 year, 3 months!
So in summary, most of the time is spent fetching data from disk.
The diagrams – Most Excellent
Go read the entire post…
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