That something doesn't make a big improvement doesn't mean that the improvement does not exist. If I wanted to show where ordering truly does not matter, I wou

That something doesn't make a big improvement doesn't mean that the improvement does not exist. If I wanted to show where ordering truly does not matter, I would rather look at encoding schemes. Some versions of Ethernet use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64b/66b_encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64b/66b_encoding , meaning that the smallest unit that can be read at once is 8 bytes. That removes the ordering from IPv4 addresses, but IPv6 can still get handled earlier by taking ordering into account.