> be made either through Ethernet or by reading values from RAM Ok? This is not a rebuttal of the parent comment at all. You could also read and write the data

> be made either through Ethernet or by reading values from RAM Ok? This is not a rebuttal of the parent comment at all. You could also read and write the data on notecards and compute with a mechanical calculator, but that's totally irrelevant to the parent's point. Hardware matters a lot. Other things certainly matter as well, but saying the structure of the computation is fixed doesn't mean hardware can't change the performance (in absolute perf, perf/W, and perf/$) by many orders of magnitude.