Abstract: A computer system provides enhanced performance when executing irregular code that include pointer de-reference operations. A memory controller of the computer system first fetches a pointer value from an address location in the memory and then calculates a new address adding a constant or scale factor to the pointer value. A logical-to-physical (i.e., virtual-to-physical) translation of the pointer value is also performed. The loading of data for the initial pointer load operation is overlapped with the de-reference operation, wherein the de-reference data is prefetched from memory using the resulting address and placed into the CPU's cache.