Nitpick^2: You are probably saving a few cycles due to loop overhead around pointer offsets and bounds checking, + not having to load the items into cache twice, if the sequence is too long to fit into cache.
Agreed! I definitely wasn't telling the whole truth by saying the amount of cycles spent on looping is ultimately the same. Although the difference is complex enough that I could imagine it going either way (but you're right that the cache effects would probably be the clincher).