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A branch table allows the switch statement to determine with a small, constant number of instructions which branch to execute without having to go through a list of comparisons, while a binary search takes only a logarithmic number of comparisons, measured in the number of cases in the switch statement.
Given such data, a branch table can be extremely efficient. It usually consists of the following 3 steps: optionally validating the input data to ensure it is acceptable (this may occur without cost as part of the next step, if the input is a single byte and a 256 byte translate table is used to directly obtain the offset below). Also, if there ...
Child branches are branches that have a parent; a branch without a parent is referred to as the trunk or the mainline. [1] The trunk is also sometimes loosely referred to as HEAD, but properly head refers not to a branch, but to the most recent commit on a given branch, and both the trunk and each named branch has its own head.
[a] Branch (or branching, branched) may also refer to the act of switching execution to a different instruction sequence as a result of executing a branch instruction. Branch instructions are used to implement control flow in program loops and conditionals (i.e., executing a particular sequence of instructions only if certain conditions are ...
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Without branch prediction, the processor would have to wait until the conditional jump instruction has passed the execute stage before the next instruction can enter the fetch stage in the pipeline. The branch predictor attempts to avoid this waste of time by trying to guess whether the conditional jump is most likely to be taken or not taken.
Eager execution is a form of speculative execution where both sides of the conditional branch are executed; however, the results are committed only if the predicate is true. With unlimited resources, eager execution (also known as oracle execution) would in theory provide the same performance as perfect branch prediction.
Multiway branch is the change to a program's control flow based upon a value matching a selected criteria. It is a form of conditional statement . A multiway branch is often the most efficient method of passing control to one of a set of program labels , especially if an index has been created beforehand from the raw data .