The meat of the article:

> In my binary field code, I found that an 8-bit precomputation table (in that context, 224 items taking up 128 MB) led to faster computations than a 16-bit precomputation table (232 items taking up 8 GB): while the latter fit into RAM, the former could fit into cache, and the faster access time of the former was decisive.

Interesting to see some first principles thinking to back out the “why”.