Comment by gpm

One thing to think about is that accessing a byte memory in a system with n bytes is pretty much guaranteed to be at best a log(n) operation. After all you need log(n) sized address to index the memory, and you need to read every single one of the bits in the address to index the memory.

In practice on any particular machine all the addresses are the same length (and we have finite memory), so it doesn't quite explain the effect you are observing in the article. But it does hint that it makes sense.