I should also say that if you're designing a core for a specific workload there are always ways you can optimize it but that doesn't have anything to do with hi

I should also say that if you're designing a core for a specific workload there are always ways you can optimize it but that doesn't have anything to do with high or low level languages. See the presentation on the M6 at Hot Chips for the way they tuned their cache hierarchy to work with their database. The talk is on the Day 2 track here: http://www.hotchips.org/archives/2010s/hc26/ http://www.hotchips.org/archives/2010s/hc26/