Reminds me of the old adage "The Lisp programmer understands the value of everything, and the cost of nothing." For a great many applications, most programmers don't need to think too much about the underlying hardware (which is awesome). Until somebody asks, "Why is this so slow?", "Why does it freeze up when I do this?" -- then we're all low-level coders.
Granted, you'll probably never need to understand memory to the depth that those articles get into it, but it's often better know more than you need to. On other hand, maybe you write database integrations for a living :)
