Nicholas Alexander BuckendorfYes - I remember even way back in
  the old days of computers - when they had the various 86's at
  the end 286/386/486//amd 586 - the big deal was Cache. Even
  today, if I remember right, one of the best indications of the
  'smoothness' in performance of a computer is having multiple
  levels of cache; L1 + L2 if I remember right... they're actually
  physically different too...... I believe one is a NAND
  architecture and the other a NOR architecture.. but I might be
  mentally flipping over to my recent looking into the flash
  memory (haven't looked into Cache memory in over a year so I
  forget)"