field 110 and 3 either 2 or 3 bht state bits 130 for the identified branch address ba 110 in fig3 the modified gshare predictor consists of as follows 1 an u2018 n u2019 bit modified global history register mghr 320 2 the pht 300 containing 2 u2033 entries corresponding to the u2018 n u2019 bit mghr 320 3 a given address from the instruction address register 310 that is to be used for indexing and 4 an xor 330 in general the gshare predictor performs an xor 330 function on the instruction address from the instruction address register 310 with that of the global history in the mghr 320 to create an index into the pht 300 defined for the bht states are the options of a 2 bit 4 state design shown in fig4 or a 3 bit u215e state design shown in fig5 in regard to the 2 bit design in a 4 state machine the states are defined as guess not taken gnt state 430 where in this state the bht prediction is not taken guess weakly taken gwt state 410 where in this state the bht prediction is taken guess strongly taken gst state 420 where in this state the bht prediction is taken modified gshare scheme mgsh state 440 where in this state the directional prediction is based upon the modified gshare scheme prediction when a new entry is installed it is installed in either the strong gst state 420 or weak gwt state 410 depending on the opcode conditional opcodes which have a weak bias towards not taken install 400 are installed in the weakly taken gwt state 410 while other branches which have a strong bias towards strongly taken installed by install 401 in the strongly taken gst.