> Integer tricks and optimizations are pointless.

They’re not pointless; they’re just not the first thing to optimize.

It’s like worrying about cache locality when you have an inherently O(n^2) algorithm and could have a O(n log n) or O(n) one. Fix the biggest problem first.

Once your data layout is good and your cpu isn’t taking a 200 cycle lunch break to chase pointers, then you worry about cycle count and keeping the execution units fed.

That’s when integer tricks can matter. Depending on the micro arch, you may have twice as many execution units that can take integer instructions. And those instructions (outside of division) tend to have lower latency and higher throughput.

And if you’re doing SIMD, your integer SIMD instructions can be 2 or 4x higher throughput than float32 if you can use int16 / int8 data.

So it can very much matter. It’s just usually not the lowest hanging fruit.