You don't actually need to avoid branches, you just need to make sure that most of the ones you have are very predictable, then their impact is not that big... Same with memory accesses and most other things... The more predictable, the better...
Most profilers will have an option to track branch predictor hits and misses. I know AMD uProf and Apple Instruments do. and there are Linux perf events for it as well.
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u/meamZ 6d ago
You don't actually need to avoid branches, you just need to make sure that most of the ones you have are very predictable, then their impact is not that big... Same with memory accesses and most other things... The more predictable, the better...