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

This level of optimization is unlikely to make a worthwhile difference in all but the hottest of hotspots. Assuming it does (without proving it in a specific case) is a form of guessing, and the first rule of optimization is don't act on guesses.