Modern machines usually try to predict target addresses, not just the direction of conditional branches. You can implement it for unconditional calls and jumps

Modern machines usually try to predict target addresses, not just the direction of conditional branches. You can implement it for unconditional calls and jumps too, even for direct/relative-addressed ones. That's pretty common nowadays. When you calculate the target of a jump, you can cache it (that's what a BTB is). Next time you encounter it, you predict the target by accessing the cached value in the BTB and start fetching early instead of waiting for your jump/call to move all the way through the machine.