Latency numbers every programmer should know

This is interesting stuff; Jonas Bonér organized some general some latency data by Peter Norvig as a Gist, and others expanded on it. What's interesting is how, scaling time up by a billion, converts a CPU instruction cycle into approximately one heartbeat, and yields a disk seek time of "a semester in university".

This is easier read on the original Gist page. Sorry about my blog's narrow formatting.

Another view of this data is as an animated presentation.