I recall thinking about these things quite a bit when reading Michael Abrash back in the 90s.

How much of that advice applies to anything these days is questionable. Back then we used to squeeze as much as possible from every clock cycle.

And cache misses weren’t great but the “front side bus” vs CPU clock difference wasn’t so insane either. RAM is “far away” now.

So the stuff you optimize for has changed a bit.

Always measure!