Precisely. This is why I mentioned the 30-50 mems. A typical main memory fetch is somewhere in the 100-200ns range on modern hardware. I tend to measure the eff

Precisely. This is why I mentioned the 30-50 mems. A typical main memory fetch is somewhere in the 100-200ns range on modern hardware. I tend to measure the effectiveness of an algorithm based on, roughly, how it accesses memory. Caches play a role as well, of course. L1 is around 1ns sometimes even less. if you hit L2 it is in the vicinity of 5-10ns. It easily translates to some 30-40 insns on modern hardware. It also tells you that hunting for faster execution by compressing instructions down is not going to cut you that much extra speed nowadays. The key to fast programs is data representation. Good data representation.