Depends on the task you are concerned with; see Roofline model [1]. It boils down to "how many ops will you do for each value you load from RAM to cache". I do

Depends on the task you are concerned with; see Roofline model [1]. It boils down to "how many ops will you do for each value you load from RAM to cache". I don't know about typical consumer workloads, but e.g. for physics simulations, any time you need to solve a system where the value in a point depends on a lot of other points you are bandwidth limited. Like solving the pressure equation in fluid simulations. Also I believe a lot of traditional database workloads fall into this category. You can measure memory bandwidth with the STREAMS benchmark. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofline_model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofline_model