I would expect that the branch predictor has issues, especially on a chip that's nearly 10 years old. However, I controlled for this as best as I could. The if

I would expect that the branch predictor has issues, especially on a chip that's nearly 10 years old. However, I controlled for this as best as I could. The if statements that control the VM's flow are the same for each test. The only real difference is that The switch statement has to branch to jump to the next virtual operation to take, while all others use unconditional jumps to do that. EDIT: These articles are interesting, thank you.