"Suppose you want to support strings and have a string comparison instruction. You might think that "it's done in the hardware", so it's blindingly fast. It isn

"Suppose you want to support strings and have a string comparison instruction. You might think that "it's done in the hardware", so it's blindingly fast. It isn't, because the hardware still has to access memory," well, there is this: http://www.micron.com/about/innovations/automata-processing http://www.micron.com/about/innovations/automata-processing