This post takes a look at the speed - latency and throughput - of various subsystems in a modern commodity PC, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. I hope to give a feel for the relative speed of each component and a cheatsheet for back-of-the-envelope performance calculations. I've tried to show real-world throughputs (the sources are posted as a comment) rather than theoretical maximums. Time units ar
![What Your Computer Does While You Wait](https://cdn-ak-scissors.b.st-hatena.com/image/square/c5e2a1f128e1fb80fe3fbb74ac946bfb085ba2d9/height=288;version=1;width=512/http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.duartes.org%2Fimg%2FblogPosts%2FlatencyAndThroughputNorth.png)