This is why micro-benchmarking is Russian roulette. When you distill a loop until you're finding the exact bottleneck in the system (pipelining, branch predict

This is why micro-benchmarking is Russian roulette. When you distill a loop until you're finding the exact bottleneck in the system (pipelining, branch prediction, etc) you need to be very very careful you're measuring what you think you are. Otherwise you'll end up in this situation where you're benchmarking a compiler...