You don't really need pipelining, or branch prediction, or microcode loop caches or whatever else necessarily. If you're optimizing for single core performance

You don't really need pipelining, or branch prediction, or microcode loop caches or whatever else necessarily. If you're optimizing for single core performance over everything else, then that's how you squeeze as much as you can into the processor. I don't believe GPUs do branch prediction at all, for example.