> Branches are often faster than branch-free methods, since they can speculate certain data dependencies away. And often they're slower, since predicting some

> Branches are often faster than branch-free methods, since they can speculate certain data dependencies away. And often they're slower, since predicting some branches is often impossible due to the data :) So the processor ends up miss-predicting most of the time, thinking it knows what happened last time. It all depends on what you're doing.