Pardon my (likely striking) ignorance of hardware, but I remember a discussion from way back in college about pipelines and branches. The gist of it was, you m

Pardon my (likely striking) ignorance of hardware, but I remember a discussion from way back in college about pipelines and branches. The gist of it was, you may as well guess at branches, since if you're wrong (and careful), you don't waste any more time than if you hadn't guessed. The discussion went from there into what constituted effective methods for guessing, and I remember a comment to the effect that "do what you did last time" was one of the best strategies. I was left with the impression that hardware did this, though it's possible I misunderstood. Google seems to back me up a bit, but I admit I'm out of my depth on this topic. Anyway, it seems to me that if my recollection were accurate, a single branch which went the same way virtually every time could have a lower cost in a heavily pipelined system than a more distrubted error checking scheme.