More to the point, storing the pointers cost memory. Switching from 32-bit to 64-bit effectively halved the caches for pointer-rich programs. AMD64 was a win

More to the point, storing the pointers cost memory. Switching from 32-bit to 64-bit effectively halved the caches for pointer-rich programs. AMD64 was a win largely due to all the things they did to compensate (including doubling the number of registers).