The problem with linked lists is the memory address of nodes isn't necessarily contiguous because of malloc and the value could be NULL? Why does interleave loop make it faster for the cpu? It still a linked list, arbitrary memory, could be NULL? Not sure what im missing here?
If there are two lists, in the first example, you're doing:
a1 -> b1 -> c1 -> d1
a2 -> b2 -> c2
[a1, a2]
[b1, b2]
[c1, c2]
[d1]
Yep, the problem with a linked list is that you don't know the address of the next pointer, it could be allocated anywhere. However, if you have a continuous array, when you read the first item, you're also fetching the next items in the cache line.