There's a trick here I hadn't noticed. Good times. If the plan is 8 byte aligned data and use the three low bits for other stuff, you mask them off before load

There's a trick here I hadn't noticed. Good times. If the plan is 8 byte aligned data and use the three low bits for other stuff, you mask them off before loads/stores. An alternative is to use the high three bits, store the pointer/8, and multiply by 8 to retrieve. That's appealing on x64 because memory operations can include a *8 in the encoding. Specifically, I've long wondered whether the pointer masking tricks mess up prefetch/speculation. It seems plausible that making the dereference look more like a normal memory operation is helpful for that. (It also means the low-alignment-bits and high-unused-bits can be considered contiguous modulo the *8 on decode which is probably less annoying when using both ranges)