SSDs weren't a thing gen years ago and may not be a thing in ten years. This is not eternal fundamental knowledge. The important thing is that registers are way

SSDs weren't a thing gen years ago and may not be a thing in ten years. This is not eternal fundamental knowledge. The important thing is that registers are way faster than on chip cache which is way faster than ... insert levels of indirection ... which is way faster than ... insert levels of remoteness. Even registers vs on chip cache may not be around that long (probably will for a good long time though). What's actually surprising is that it might be faster to pull data from elsewhere in a data center than your own SSD. I recall John Carmack saying he could ping a server in Europe faster than he could get a pixel onto a display (triple buffered updates at 120fps iirc)