Just came across a good paper that discusses these issues: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1509.05053v1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1509.05053v1</a><p>The approach it from a different angle, but come to similar conclusions:<p><i>Our conclusion is contrary to our expectations and to previous findings and goes
against conventional wisdom, which states that accesses to RAM are slow, and should be
minimized. A more accurate statement, that accounts for our findings, is that accesses to
RAM have high latency and this latency needs to be mitigated.</i><p><i>...</i><p><i>Our results show that, in a processor that has
speculative execution, one can obtain many of the benefits of runahead even on processors
that do not specifically implement it. While this may not be news to hardware experts, to
the best of our knowledge, we are unaware of any algorithms (or even implementations)
that deliberately make use of it.</i><p>I would suggest this is a very fruitful direction to pursue.