Idk ... this is like saying your local grocery store is effectively your extremely large kitchen, it ignores the logistics and cost of access that create planni

Idk ... this is like saying your local grocery store is effectively your extremely large kitchen, it ignores the logistics and cost of access that create planning or out-of-order requirements for best performance. > so memory is (effectively) an extremely large register bank. This was true-ish however in the late 70's/early 80's/1Mhz CPU days - but registers were always better even if slightly. The 6502, for example, could load the X register with an immediate value in 2 cycles, or from zero page (first 256 bytes of RAM) in 3 cycles, or from an arbitrary 16-bit address in 4 cycles. The few register-to-register operations all work in 2 cycles. (Then you have the TMS9900 that actually did use RAM as registers - only having 3 - one for the program counter, one for the status register, and a "workspace pointer" that told the CPU where the fake 'registers' lived.) Of course, x86 has elaborate caching mechanisms to help. Your freezer is still in your kitchen (cache), but you still have limited space you actually use to do work (countertop). What RAM is basically a superfast I/O device (which is why memory-mapped I/O is a thing). It's funny that the IBM mainframe for RAM - "storage" - kinda made more and more sense the more that RAM speed diverged from CPU speed.