Obligatory link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-an-unsorted-array http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1

Obligatory link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-an-unsorted-array http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processin... see most upvoted answer for short lecture about cost of branching in modern CPU's.