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Originally Posted by Ignition
Branch predictor 'guesses' what instructions are going to go to the CPU next and pre-executes them.
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Not quite. It guesses what the outcome of a condition statement is and pre-fetches the instructions hoping that it is right. If it gets it right, then the time taken to fetch the instructions into memory is saved. If it's wrong, then the correct instructions have to be fetched and everything is slowed up.