Reply To: Prediction

Don’t some Mills also have deferred branches? Since multiple branches that retire in the same cycle are defined to resolve to the first address in issue+slot order, this has some potential to lock in a code path for prediction: issue a deferred branch some cycles ahead, and if it’s known taken, we know enough to lock in that address and start the I$ load immediately. Of course, that mechanism works better for open code, since most Mill loops will be single-cycle pipelined loops that can’t schedule the exit branch as anything other than immediate.