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

Most processors provide branch prediction that is better than 50%. In fact, if you get a 1% improvement in branch prediction then you can probably publish a paper. There are a mountain of papers on this topic if you are interested.

You're better off worrying about cache hits and misses.