[moregrist]

You wouldn’t need five tables. Each trit takes up two bits when unpacked into 0,1,2 values.

You can do a full unpacking-via-lookup with a uint16[256] and then do bit shifting and masking to extract the individual trits, but using an extra byte in each entry (or 3 tables) would let you extract with just two shifts.

This starts to vary a lot with the microarchitecture, and there’s the added dimension of SIMD vectorization, so accurate timing in a realistic context becomes important.

[zephen]

I agree.

But then, I'm pretty sure you haven't said anything different than what I said in the great-great-grandparent of your comment, other than slightly fleshing it out for a couple of particular scenarios.

But you haven't covered the packing, which is the primary thing I was suggesting you might need multiple tables for if you really wanted to use tables and really didn't want to do shifting or multiplication.