Higher branching factor gets you a better constant factor because the depth of the tree is the base-(branching factor) logarithm of the number of nodes. The num

Higher branching factor gets you a better constant factor because the depth of the tree is the base-(branching factor) logarithm of the number of nodes. The number of pointers you need to follow to reach a leaf is equal to the depth of the tree, and pointer-dereferences are likely to cause a cache miss, which is a relatively slow operation. You're correct that asymptotically, it's the same thing.