The prefetcher works only if it can predict what you&#x27;re going to access next. Chasing pointers means essentially jumping to random addresses in a given memory region. 
That&#x27;s pretty much the worst situation from a caching point of view, what the prefetcher loves is linear traversal.<p>Of course things become more complicated when you start having larger amounts of data, and you want to skip over most of it, but still keep the cache happy.