(Note: Also replied to another comment, but seems relevant here, too.) There's a very approachable explanation in the following (around the 1:01:40 mark): http

(Note: Also replied to another comment, but seems relevant here, too.) There's a very approachable explanation in the following (around the 1:01:40 mark): https://youtu.be/8I_1TSs695I?t=1h1m40s https://youtu.be/8I_1TSs695I?t=1h1m40s -- part of Design of Digital Circuits - Lecture 18: Branch Prediction II (ETH Zürich, Spring 2019). Related readings: https://safari.ethz.ch/digitaltechnik/spring2019/doku.php?id=readings#lecture_18_0205_thu https://safari.ethz.ch/digitaltechnik/spring2019/doku.php?id.... These lectures are pretty great, by the way, highly recommended to anyone interested in computer architecture: http://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/lecture-videos.html http://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/lecture-videos.html Incidentally, this year's High-Performance Computer Architecture Test of Time Award has been given to "Dynamic Branch Prediction with Perceptrons" referenced in the lecture (from 2001, https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~lin/papers/hpca01.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~lin/papers/hpca01.pdf): https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2019/02/jimenez-receives-high-performance-computer-architecture-test-of-time-award.html https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2019/02/jimenez-receives-h....