Hi, I've posted a few details and a sample program over here.
As you correctly notice, latency is a big issue on modern machines, way worse (in proportion) than it was in the late eighties.
But as soon as the wheels start turning, they spit out a lot of bytes, for sure!
From https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832, main memory latency is 100 ns; so we get 10 million fetches per second. You could get 40 MB by e.g. assuming that you have 4 one-byte requests in flight at the same time.
As they say, RAM is the new disk.