Something more than 30 years ago, I had the privilege of working as a young compiler writer for [a supercomputer designer]'s penultimate start-up. I once naive

Something more than 30 years ago, I had the privilege of working as a young compiler writer for [a supercomputer designer]'s penultimate start-up. I once naively asked him why the machine he was working on couldn't have more memory bandwidth, since the floating-point functional units were sometimes starved for operand data and it was hard to hit the peak Flop/sec figures. And his response has stuck with me ever since; basically, it makes better sense for the memory to be fully utilized, not the floating-point units, because the memory paths were way more expensive than the floating-point units. And this was something you could actually physically see through the transparent top of the system's case. I guess the lesson would be: Don't let a constraint that would be fairly cheap to overdesign be the limiting factor in a system's performance.