What techniques to avoid conditional branching do you know?

Question

Sometimes a loop where the CPU spends most of the time has some branch prediction miss (misprediction) very often (near .5 probability.) I\'ve seen a few techniques on very isol

Answer 1

Using Matt Joiner's example:

if (b > a) b = a;

You could also do the following, without having to dig into assembly code:

bool if_else = b > a;
b = a * if_else + b * !if_else;