How prevalent is branch prediction on current CPUs?

Question

Due to the huge impact on performance, I never wonder if my current day desktop CPU has branch prediction. Of course it does. But how about the various ARM offerings? Does iPhon

Answer 1

You can expect Dynamic Branch predictor in any out of order processor, those processors not only rely on pipelining but also fetch multiple instructions at the time, and they have multiple execution units(Floating point units, ALU), more registers; to increase the instruction execution, you have multiple instructions on the fly on any given moment, of course branches are a problem if you want to keep all that machinery utilization high so this kind of processors, rely on dynamic branch prediction in order to keep throughput and utilization very high.

You can expect any server to have dynamic branch prediction, also desktops, in the past embedded systems like the ARM chips in current smartphones did not have branch predictions since they had smaller pipelines, and they did not have out of order execution, but as Moore's law give us more transistor per area, you will start seeing more and more processors increasing their architecture. So to answer your question, besides the obvious looking for the CPU specs, you can expect to have branch prediction on chips of 32 Bits, bigger pipelines, out of order exection. The most recent chips from ARM are moving in some level to this directions.