Critical word first (was: Privilege Levels Below User)

[...] is performed which *completely bypasses* the cache; [...]

Yes, critical word first.

How important is this nowadays?
From what I can tell, the bandwidth-time of transferring a whole cache
line is extremely short compared to the latency to the first word, so
I assumed that whether the critical word is send first or not wouldn't
make much of a difference.

Is my intuition wrong?
Or is it simply that the difference is small but the cost is
even smaller?


        Stefan