The PyData ecosystem is home to some of the best and most popular tools for doing data-science. Every data-scientist alive today has used pandas and scikit-learn and even Large Language Models know how to use them! For many years there have also been alternative implementations with similar interfaces and libraries with completely new approaches that focus on achieving the ultimate in performance and hardware acceleration. This talk will look at the recent efforts to give users the best of both worlds: a familiar and widely used interface as well as high performance.