Run a profiler on your code sometime and see how many branches it reports taking. You can easily get millions of branches per second, so 1% events happen hundre

Run a profiler on your code sometime and see how many branches it reports taking. You can easily get millions of branches per second, so 1% events happen hundreds of thousands of times. See for example this quick investigation and look at the number of branches for what's not a very big program https://bnikolic.co.uk/blog/hpc-perf-branchprediction https://bnikolic.co.uk/blog/hpc-perf-branchprediction