It's an interesting article but surely a modern instance should be able to manage more than 4 u32 compares per cycle? Any machine with AVX2 (or beyond) should e

It's an interesting article but surely a modern instance should be able to manage more than 4 u32 compares per cycle? Any machine with AVX2 (or beyond) should either be able to do 2x256 AVX2 VPCMPEQD instructions (or AVX 512 can do 1x512). The code to marshal up the results of this compare and do something useful with would push out to another cycle or two but IMO we can surely manage to compare an entire cache line (64 bytes) in 1 cycle worth of work. This doesn't invalidate his point, and there are even more interesting things that can be done with packed data formats - and of course if you're searching a 6-bit column for some data item (or set of data items) you might be even happier to be using a columnar form (especially if the row contains lots of stuff: the 6:1 ratio in the article might be understating the advantage of working at the column level).