[karmakaze]

> That I use Big O to analyze time and not operations is important.

This is why we have benchmarks and big-O for different things. If we care about cache level sizes and the constant factors, use benchmarks with increasing orders of magnitde.

Or if preferring to remain abstract, model N as the bits of memory so that the access cost goes up with increasing N. To represent specific cache level sizes and latencies use benchmarks everyone will understand.