I assume you meant byte compared to int.  No, there is no speed advantage, since modern CPUs use 32-bit or 64-bit registers. In fact, there may actually be a speed penalty, depending on the platform and the Java implementation.  The best way to find out (or at least the only method I trust) is to test it.

Opps, yes, I meant int. Must have been sleepy, thanks

If you have lot of small integer data (below 128), using an array of bytes can make sense, too, to reduce memory consumption.