So silly, the responses to you!

I think people have been conditioned because for two decades, a web server has typically been as much memory as you can afford, and then any old processor you have lying around.

But everything has changed. It used to be that it took several orders of magnitude more clock time to get a single byte from disk into the processor than from memory but now it's less than an order of magnitude.

On-chip data and instruction pipelines and caches have grown much larger and cleverer. We used to think of the disk as "just" a way to keep memory full, but now we also think of external RAM as "just" a way to keep the caches and pipelines full.

I am not fond of Apple's aggressive rapaciousness, but I have to hand it to them on this one - it's a masterpiece.

ARM was already exciting, because it cleaned house, sweeping away all traces of the x86/Pentium dross for once and all, and because it's an open specification. But the tight integration of the ARM cores and other modules within the M1 chip, I so hate this term, but it really is a game changer.