[rcxdude]

yes, but the point is that on modern CPUs checking those bytes is likely far from the bottleneck and thus skipping them saves you very little time, if any at all.

[taeric]

You might be surprised. Consider, counting to 2 million by 5 is significantly faster than counting by 1. Especially if you just go ahead and start some prefetching in the memory, I would expect that this can speed things up considerably.

Edit: I should say I would still think things should be benchmarked to really know...

[justin66]

(as mentioned by yan below) Ridiculous Fish did these sorts of benchmarks here: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...