The bottleneck is not reading the byte, it is the CPU clocks needed to figure out that it is safe to skip. Assuming cache prefetching works well thanks to the

The bottleneck is not reading the byte, it is the CPU clocks needed to figure out that it is safe to skip. Assuming cache prefetching works well thanks to the sequential search, you can try to max out the memory bandwidth. But even DDR3 has best-case transfer rates from 6-17 GB/second. So to max it out on a 3GHz CPU, you need to eliminate 2-6 bytes on every tick of the clock.