To be even more fair, counted constant sized loops never required particularly good branch prediction, especially if the code is well laid out so that your "mis

To be even more fair, counted constant sized loops never required particularly good branch prediction, especially if the code is well laid out so that your "miss" does literally one more cheap step. Misprediction there means you computed one more vector or value, not a huge loss compared to a cache miss. Branch misprediction hurts a lot when it forces a cache miss mostly, whether it's for data or for instructions, or ties up a deep instruction pipeline completely with lousy abort, which most CPUs do not have. (See: Nehalem.)