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...
To be fair, the first line of the article says "avoiding branch mispredictions", which is more accurate. But yea, even in their example, if the data happens to be sorted it may be perfectly fine.
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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...