It's probably more in reference to the layer the work is completed in. I haven't used matlab in years but you can probably sum an array by iterating or you can

It's probably more in reference to the layer the work is completed in. I haven't used matlab in years but you can probably sum an array by iterating or you can call a faster more efficient library. You get much greater gains when doing this in higher dimensions. If you can do your operations at a matrix level you get a magnitude improvement in speed in most languages.