Logical handling

I want to handle matrices of type logical, and I reckon that
these ought to be done faster than the equivalent integer
matrices with MOD(*,2) hung on. However, on my Intel compiler,
the two came out almost exactly the same in cpu time. Clearly,
logicals are stored in whole words, rather than bits.
Is this general for compilers, or is it an Intel thing?
--
Dieter Britz, Kemisk Institut, Aarhus Universitet
.