What if you could only carry things to/from that closet in a fixed-size box? Typical L1 cache size for the x86 family is only a few times larger than on the 48

What if you could only carry things to/from that closet in a fixed-size box? Typical L1 cache size for the x86 family is only a few times larger than on the 486. Cache is getting faster, but transistor shrinkage should affect cache speed and instruction execution time in roughly equal proportion. Of course, the marginal value of spending development time improving performance can vary a great deal; but when performance matters, the key considerations are going to remain location, location, and location for the foreseeable future.