title: Approximate timings for various operations on a "typical desktop PC" anno 2010
body: <p>In the article <a href="http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html#answers" rel="nofollow noreferrer">"Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"</a> Peter Norvig (Director of Research, Google) gives the following approximate timings for various operations on a typical 1GHz PC back in 2001:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>execute single instruction = 1 nanosec = (1/1,000,000,000) sec</li>
  <li>fetch word from L1 cache memory = 2 nanosec</li>
  <li>fetch word from main memory = 10 nanosec</li>
  <li>fetch word from consecutive disk location = 200 nanosec</li>
  <li>fetch word from new disk location (seek) = 8,000,000 nanosec = 8 millisec</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>What would the corresponding timings be for your definition of a typical PC desktop anno 2010?</p>