Branch Misses

How bad do branch misses hurt a programs performance? In C and Java?

for example how big of an impact would :


int shitinanus()
{
    int val = getanus();
    if(val != 0)
        return ANALTONIGHT;
    return ALONETONIGHT;
}

be knowing that val will most likely be 0 99% of the time compared to the below function


int shitinanus()
{
    int val = getanus();
    if(val == 0)
        return ALONETONIGHT;
    return ANALTONIGHT;
}

ONE WORD: THE FORCED PROFILE-GUIDED OPTIMIZATION OF THE CODE

THREAD OVER

>>3
http://www.7-cpu.com/
Cortex-A9
Whoah, I didn't expect toy CPUs to perform that well. OTOH at these low frequencies relative RAM latency is much lower and this benchmark is highly dependent on that, but still it's kinda impressive to have a CPU which can compete with x86 in IPC for once. Now they just need to put 12 cores in and bump the clock threefold.