The Sorting Algorithm Myth: How Modern Hardware Rewrites Performance Rankings

While computer science textbooks teach that Quick Sort is fastest, modern benchmarking on an Intel i9-12900K shows this is only true 30% of the time. The optimal sorting algorithm varies dramatically by data size—Insertion Sort wins for small arrays, Radix Sort dominates massive datasets, and Quick Sort only wins in the middle range. This gap between theory and practice highlights how real-world algorithm selection must account for hardware characteristics like cache behavior, not just theoretical complexity.