How and why CPUs do “branch prediction” (2017)
I feel like fixed precision neural nets are probably the future of branch prediction.   Both &#x27;hardcoding&#x27; a neural net on a large amount of software and then designing the weights into the CPU in a ROM, but also dynamic approaches to deciding which prediction strategy to use for a specific branch based on state recorded by another neural net.<p>Approaches like this have been used as a fun exercise, but now I think we&#x27;re reaching the point where single thread performance is so important, and mispredicts are getting more expensive, so it&#x27;s worth taking quite a big power and area hit to get a few more percentage points of performance...