alt Hacker NewsModern CPUs have hundreds of megabytes of cache. That's more than the entire hard disk space required by Windows in the 1990s.
You could install an entire Windows system, emulated in cache of a modern CPU, including the hard disk, and modern computers are still slow, partly because the CPU does nothing while waiting for RAM to fetch data, and partly because decades of people prioritizing abstractions over efficient coding have made software totally inefficient.
Software has gotten vastly more complex over the intervening decades, and unfortunately it has historically been beyond human capacity and/or institutional time/money availability to keep everything running super efficiently.
The good news is that with LLMs, we can make software efficient again, much more cheaply!