It used to be true in the past. Back then, processors were slower, and they had no cache, since the processor and memory speeds were roughly matched. A few inte

It used to be true in the past. Back then, processors were slower, and they had no cache, since the processor and memory speeds were roughly matched. A few integer multiplications would be enough to cost more than a single memory access. It should still hold true today for small embedded processors with slow arithmetic and no cache.