Check out [1]: it has the most thorough description of branch prediction I've ever seen (chapter 3), across a lot of historical and current CPUs. It is mostly e

Check out [1]: it has the most thorough description of branch prediction I've ever seen (chapter 3), across a lot of historical and current CPUs. It is mostly empirical, so you do have to take it with a grain of salt sometimes (the author acknowledges this). Supposedly the branch prediction on modern AMD CPUs is far more sophisticated, based on [2] (a citation pulled from [1]). [1] https://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf https://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf [2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7Elin/papers/hpca01.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/%7Elin/papers/hpca01.pdf