[freikev]

Programs that are pointer-heavy tend to be a little slower. There's really not that much 64-bit arithmetic going on in the average application, so the more data per clock cycle only helps in a particular class of apps. Cryptography tends to do significantly better, for that exact reason. You do seem to be conflating code quality with compiler throughput, though. I'll try to clarify in much more detail in a CLR Codegen blog post soon.