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> What is missing?

Fast memory, addressable by the core.

The one that is there, but can only used by accessing the slow memory.

And praying that the slow memory is magically in the fast memory.

I think ultimately what I'm asking for means a much, much tighter bound on worst case performance, but at the cost of best case performance. That most of us never see anyway. For certain workloads, that could end up being a net positive. And there's probably some way to expose CPU metadata that gives some of that difference back.

I think it’s worthwhile to distinguish between throughput and latency for these sorts of discussions, rather than just talking about performance since scratchpads are usually better for latency (even best-case latency) and caches are usually better for throughput. Though of course in this as in any sort of discussion of computer performance, caveats abound.

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