alt Hacker News50-70 MB/s is burst best case scenario linear read into nothing on contemporary 1996 chipsets/CPUs. Moving more or less halves that, writing is slightly faster than reading due to cache lookups.
320MB/s is even faster than theoretical maximum of EDO on Pentium platform. 8 bytes x 66MHz / 5-2-2-2 timings = <260MB/s burst.
Quake optimized for prefilling caches, but not for contemporary cache sizes. https://dependency-injection.com/2mb-cache-benchmarks/ Doom gains tiny amount when going from 256KB to 512KB, Quake linearly gains all the way to mindbogglingly absurd 2MB of L2. Could really benefit from data-oriented design, but there was no tooling for that at the time not to mention time crunch, Abrash did all he could under circumstances.
I don't think the initial access time (latency) shall be included when speaking about peak bandwidth, otherwise it is not the peak bandwidth.
Peak bandwidth shall be considered with ideally infinite (large enough) payload to make latency negligible. When you have these two values, latency and peak bandwidth, you can estimate your (still theoretical, of course) performance given the transfer size.
The article uses the 240-320 MB/s peak bandwidth, and 110-130 ns latency for a comparison with the used external flash, which has latency in the us range and a peak bandwidth of 17 MB/s (arguably assuming using infinite payload, as 136.5/8 is about 17, i.e. without taking the initial setup time).
Still, even if you compare the actual speeds of a 1996 Pentium with the theoretical external flash speed values cited in the article, the consideration does not change: the external flash is much slower than what you could get even in 1996.