Great job; that was definitely a point of comparison that was missing from the original article. I'm surprised this actually is faster, but if it is only by 10%, then I still think the memory-less algorithm is preferable.
On modern-day systems main memory access is much slower than the processor, and on multi-core systems (which are the norm these days, though not all cores are always in use, of course) the memory bus can easily become a bottleneck. Benchmarks tend to hide that fact because they are often run on a single core on an otherwise idle system, so they usually have all memory bandwidth and cache memory to themselves, which isn't really representative of real-world systems.
For that reason, I believe that algorithms that do not depend on fast memory access to work efficiently are preferable to those that make use of large memory caches, at least if the performance difference isn't too great.
On modern-day systems main memory access is much slower than the processor, and on multi-core systems (which are the norm these days, though not all cores are always in use, of course) the memory bus can easily become a bottleneck. Benchmarks tend to hide that fact because they are often run on a single core on an otherwise idle system, so they usually have all memory bandwidth and cache memory to themselves, which isn't really representative of real-world systems.
For that reason, I believe that algorithms that do not depend on fast memory access to work efficiently are preferable to those that make use of large memory caches, at least if the performance difference isn't too great.