Branch vs. Branchless
Wanna try branchless programming for yourself? Check out the link at the end of this post.
Program execution is faster and more efficient when microprocessors can continuously fetch instructions from the cache. This is particularly important in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Real-Time Systems (RTS), where execution times have to be predictable and not fluctuate. In the event of a cache miss, new instructions have to be fetched from RAM to repopulate the cache, causing performance to suffer.
The more predictable the execution path of a program, the better for performance. Branchless programming is a coding technique to minimize the number of possible execution branches. Think of if statements executing one part of the program or another; when the predicted code is in one branch, but the other branch needs to run, this causes inefficiencies and delays.
Branch vs. branchless code. . Contribute to dcirne/branches development by creating an account on GitHub.
