The only time it would make a big difference would be if you were doing a lot of small memmoves in a tight loop. In that scenario, you mispredict at the end of

The only time it would make a big difference would be if you were doing a lot of small memmoves in a tight loop. In that scenario, you mispredict at the end of the loop within memmove/memcpy anyway. So when the outer loop comes back around, the pipe is already empty and any mis-predict on the pointer comparison is basically harmless.