The article says that the new web cache is "a completely black box [...] clone of Memcached that has been reworked to take advantage of [...] modern processors like the Xeon 5500".

Marketing fluff aside, this implies the vendor has some proprietary technology that is intensely tightly coupled to the the cpu. Doesn't this imply that they either wrote their own compilers to grok the innards of the CPU or they wrote it in something ridiculous like assembler? Either way, that sounds like an insanely expensive and short-term approach.

Or perhaps it's all marketing and the Reg is repeating the content of a press release without doing too much investigation. Please tell.

My hunch is that somebody somewhere used gcc and Intel's vtune. Like the rest of the industry. But without the need to have the Reg parrot it breathlessly like an episode of Nancy Grace.