Superscalar processors have a deep pipeline with many execution units and keep a lot of instructions in flight so a penalty of a misprediction or stall is signi

Superscalar processors have a deep pipeline with many execution units and keep a lot of instructions in flight so a penalty of a misprediction or stall is significant. Every time it reaches a branch instruction that depends on a result which is not yet available it would need to speculate or stall. Most programs consist of small amounts of compute code followed by a branch that might depends on the results of that code.