How expensive is it to dereference a pointer?

Question

How expensive is it to perform the dereference operation on a pointer?

I can imagine that the memory transfer is somehow proportional to the object size, but I want

Answer 1

Dereferencing can be expensive mostly because it costs an instruction to fetch data from memory which might be far away and do not exhibit locality of reference. In that case, the processor should fetch data from non-cached memory and even hard disk (in case of a hard page fault).