I recall that when that technology came out, there was a heavy marketing stunt involved. For the boast's sake, performance had to be conjured. And as seamlessly as possible. And as noticeable as possible. That really affected the design development, and not in a good way. The problem (in what I quoted) here is the poor measurement base, the wrong comparison base, and what is counted or discounted as value. So that cache really speeds up nearly all the code written for any system. Such a flat model does not, however, make much distinction between a memory hogging application that might not require performance and some server process that has to be up and running with as little lag as possible. What is counted there in the terms of cache performance really? That 0.1% (that someone bothered to hand optimize the memory access patterns for) might be the only one really needing that cache. That, however, is not how you sell technology to the public, isn't it? You have to show them a general speed-up, even when it doesn't matter. You have to show them that the same application that used to do something in a given period of time does it now in less. That's how you sell. But that's not how you develop, hopefully.