Comment by whizzter

The article does mention cache friendly access patterns in the same context.

But yes, you're right. Back when I started with optimizations in the mid 90s memory _latencies_ were fairly minor compared to complex instructions so most things that wasn't additions (and multiplications on the Pentium) would be faster from a lookup table, over time memory latencies grew and grew as clock speeds and other improvements made the distance to the physical memory an actual factor and lookup tables less useful compared to recomputing things.

Still today there are things that are expensive enough that can be fit in a lookup table that is small enough that it doesn't get evicted from cache during computation, but they're few.