Yep. And if you are using clang (or something else that does SSA register allocation), you basically first build the SSA form, compile it down to a fixed regist

Yep. And if you are using clang (or something else that does SSA register allocation), you basically first build the SSA form, compile it down to a fixed register set, and then the CPU reconstructs the SSA form. Another thing that's often misunderstood is branch prediction -- branch prediction is not looking at branches and picking which way to go. Branch prediction runs easily at least 3 cycles before the CPU can see the instructions, so it operates just on memory addresses, and tries to guess the next address to fetch. Generally, before it's built any statistics, it just guesses "next address". When there are jumps, it builds history out of those and makes decision based on that. On various architectures, there used to be hinted branches where the predictor could be tweaked to always first attempt to follow a taken branch, and fall back to prediction if that fails a few times. The hints are all no-ops today, simply because there is no way for the predictor to make use of instruction contents because it doesn't see those until it's work is already done.