I was thinking something slightly more complicated. Correct me if I'm wrong but you have to know the memory address to prefetch so it can only deal with a single level of indirection. Often it's a case where you know you'll need x but you'll also need x.y (and y is a pointer) and you can't prefetch that until you have x. For many cases you could build an index to get both efficiently but I think it's pretty hard to do generically.