Oh really? That sounds a bit crazy, albeit it has its logic .

The multi core part yeah, they focused on parallelisation to speed up IBD. My vague memory from Eric's explanation was that it stuck everything in RAM to make access fast but that's obviously not right.

My question is motivated by the, I hope, obvious intuition that there has to be a limit somewhere where things break, since you theoretically need access to the entire utxo set to complete validation of state updates.