I don't buy this. I understand the use of your term 'threaded', but these are unconditional and therefore can be incorporated into the instruction pipeline with

I don't buy this. I understand the use of your term 'threaded', but these are unconditional and therefore can be incorporated into the instruction pipeline with little or no overhead. Here's a very old SO post, CPus won't have got worse since then https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5127833/meaningful-cost-of-the-jump-instruction https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5127833/meaningful-cost-... "But in general, on modern processors, there is minimal cost for an unconditional jump. It's basically pretty much free apart from a very small amount of instruction cache overhead. It will probably get executed in parallel with neighbouring instructions so might not even cost you a clock cycle. "