This reminds me of one of the pages that Google has internally that, very roughly, breaks down the cost of various things so you can calculate equivalencies.
As an example of what I mean (i.e., these numbers and equivalencies are completely pulled out of thin-air and I am not asserting these in any way):
* 1 Engineer-year = $100,000
* 25T of RAM = 1 Engineer-week
* 1ms of display latency = 1 Engineer-year
This allows engineeers to calculate tradeoffs when they're building things and to optimize their time for business impact. E.g.: it's not worth optimizing memory usage by itself, Latency is king, Don't waste your time shaving yaks, etc etc.
Yet everyone uses much slower RAM in servers and will likely continue to do so, all the while caches swell, etc.
Optimizing memory usage is almost irrelevant today, until it starts being a bandwidth problem, and that's still solvable but only through complex scaling strategies that also cost several engineer-years.
As an example of what I mean (i.e., these numbers and equivalencies are completely pulled out of thin-air and I am not asserting these in any way):
This allows engineeers to calculate tradeoffs when they're building things and to optimize their time for business impact. E.g.: it's not worth optimizing memory usage by itself, Latency is king, Don't waste your time shaving yaks, etc etc.