[lasagnaphil]

How is a storage format that's not used for math important for speeding up actual computations? I'm curious.

[Athas]

Many of these algorithms are bandwidth- or cache-limited on modern machines, so you can get significant speedup by storing your data in fewer bytes, even if you expand it in registers before actually doing computation on it.

[retrac]

We're reaching a point where it's often faster to store pages in RAM compressed with a fast algo like LZ4 and to decompress them, than to simply copy from RAM uncompressed to L1 cache.

[37ef_ced3]

Exactly. In this case, the limit is memory bandwidth.