Vitalik: Future computing models should more accurately reflect memory hierarchies and physical limitations

Foresight News reported that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article titled "Memory access is O(N^(1/3))". In the article, he pointed out that while arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication, division, etc.) for fixed-size numbers are typically considered to take one unit of time, and memory access is also considered to take one unit of time, this assumption is not accurate. Both in theory and in practice, memory access requires O(N^⅓) time: if the memory size increases by 8 times, the time required for read and write operations will double. Vitalik noted that this rule has practical implications in cryptography and algorithm optimization, and called for future computational models to more realistically reflect memory hierarchies and physical constraints.