Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math
 &gt; Let this sink in. Random access into the cache has comparable performance to sequential access from RAM. The drop off from sub-L1 16 KB to L2-sized 256 KB is 2x or less.<p>&gt; I think this has profound implications.<p>I think I agree.<p>Can anyone here posit a theory <i>why</i> this is true? Is this a consequence of all the stream processing work in recent generations of processor? Or something else?<p>Is he saying that pointer chasing even when the values are in cache is the culprit?