There is a very direct sense in which pointer chasing _is_ the fundamental operation of sparse graph processing. On top of what access patterns the developers

There is a very direct sense in which pointer chasing _is_ the fundamental operation of sparse graph processing. On top of what access patterns the developers tend to use, there's always the JVM garbage collector (the bane of efficiency) which runs a basic graph algorithm over the entire program's network of pointers. Although, I suspect in many applications the graph in question is small (by comparison to big-data-scale graphs) and throwing heavy machinery like this at it would be overkill. Then again, maybe I'm not dreaming big enough, and this kind of processor will make the need for cache line locality optimizations, careful instruction scheduling around memory I/O, and half-second freezes for GC a thing of the past?