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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

He is talking about L1 and L2 caches. They usually use more area than the CPUs, even them being only a few MB in size.

Oh, so the physical size on the die, not the size in bytes. That makes sense!

Actually, no - he meant the size in bytes. For example, my Digital Ocean droplet reports...

    # egrep '^(cache |model )'  /proc/cpuinfo
    model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L 0 @ 2.00GHz
    cache size      : 15360 KB

To understand the context of the article's claim, let me just add that we used to make fun of Emacs people by saying the name stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". That was a time when a machine with 8MB was a big one. You can see above that machines nowadays have caches larger than that!

And to compensate, we've now invented editors based on Javascript :-)

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