title: How does a branch target buffer reduce latency?
body: <p>I guess there is something I'm just not getting. I believe I understand the concept behind a BTB... but I don't get how it is useful.</p>
  
  <p>So the BTB, in the IF stage of a pipelined processor, allows us to know the likely target of a branch. This is knowledge we would typically discover in the ID stage... so we have it one stage earlier.</p>
  
  <p>But... so what? What do we DO with this information? How does it makes our pipeline any faster?</p>