There's a fantastic, massively upvoted StackOverflow post that can also provide some insight here. This may be a little more accessible, since it's such a significant runtime difference with very simple source code.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-it-faster...

Thanks so much for sharing this, great read !

For those, like me, that want to play with what this stackoverflow talks about, here's a fiddle of it: https://jsfiddle.net/tbinetruy/Latkmk2q/1/ (code takes 2s to run and loads firebug for console logs).

The question is very interesting and good phrased, and the answer is better than many classes that many students had about processors and so on.

That's a great talk, brings together a lot of different things I've seen in one place.