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

In my opinion if you're reaching down to this level of optimization, it's probably time to drop right into assembly language.

Essentially you're counting on the compiler generating a specific pattern of assembly to take advantage of this optimization in C anyway. It's difficult to guess exactly what code a compiler is going to generate, so you'd have to look at it anytime a small change is made - why not just do it in assembly and be done with it?