I think that’s still affected by speculative execution. The CPU will process the step ahead assuming that a[i] != b[i] while it is doing the a[i] XOR b[i] check

I think that’s still affected by speculative execution. The CPU will process the step ahead assuming that a[i] != b[i] while it is doing the a[i] XOR b[i] check. So it’ll be faster if: most characters match, most characters don’t match or there are runs of matching characters. Have a read of this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi...