> Also, is there a significant difference between sequential and random reads > within an Intel processor cache?
Whether the difference is significant really depends on your application. The processor loads an entire 32-byte level-1 cache line whenever it needs any byte from that line. The data in the cache line becomes available in address order (low to high). Therefore it's better to access the data sequentially. But this will probably only be significant when you're doing low-cycle pipelined operations on millions of numbers. You haven't given any indication that you're doing that sort of thing. (In fact, you haven't even told us what you're really doing.) Read the Pentium optimization manual for more. You can get it from Intel's web site somewhere.
