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masklinntoday at 12:43 PM0 repliesview on HN

They will absolutely do that (prefetching, they can even eagerly load what’s on the other side of a pointer).

However it requires additional hardware to recognize patterns which benefit from prefetching, and every time the CPU prefetches data which ends up not being used it has both burned energy and memory bandwidth, and evicted data from the cache which might be needed (cache pollution).