This isn't even a loop. But yes, the critical path and its dependencies is the main factor in determining the run speed of the instruction sequence unless your

This isn't even a loop. But yes, the critical path and its dependencies is the main factor in determining the run speed of the instruction sequence unless your processor is balls crazy enough to value predict. ;) (It has never been successfully implemented, but a few papers have been written on it. There's actually some interesting possibilities that essentially involve value speculation and then forking an SMT thread and finding out whether or not to squash it later.)