Well kudos to you for having the right theory! I would have never assumed this behavior on modern CPUs. That trick might still be useful in the embedded space

Well kudos to you for having the right theory! I would have never assumed this behavior on modern CPUs. That trick might still be useful in the embedded space - I had to try it on my samr21-xpro too (with only an 8kiB array and slightly modified code - http://codepad.org/aPOZraI2 http://codepad.org/aPOZraI2) samr21 (Cortex M0+) naive search found: 0, took 1714 ticks found: 0, took 1713 ticks found: 0, took 1714 ticks found: 0, took 1714 ticks found: 0, took 1714 ticks found: 0, took 1713 ticks found: 0, took 1714 ticks found: 0, took 1713 ticks found: 0, took 1714 ticks found: 0, took 1714 ticks average: 1713 ticks knuth search found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks found: 0, took 1372 ticks average: 1372 ticks