一个branch prediction很好的例子

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-an-unsorted-array

Here is a piece of C++ code that shows some very peculiar performance. For some strange reason, sorting the data miraculously speeds up the code by almost 6x:

#include <algorithm>
#include <ctime>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    // Generate data
    const unsigned arraySize = 32768;
    int data[arraySize];

    for (unsigned c = 0; c < arraySize; ++c)
        data[c] = std::rand() % 256;

    // !!! With this, the next loop runs faster
    std::sort(data, data + arraySize);

    // Test
    clock_t start = clock();
    long long sum = 0;

    for (unsigned i = 0; i < 100000; ++i)
    {
        // Primary loop
        for (unsigned c = 0; c < arraySize; ++c)
        {
            if (data[c] >= 128)
                sum += data[c];
        }
    }

    double elapsedTime = static_cast<double>(clock() - start) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

    std::cout << elapsedTime << std::endl;
    std::cout << "sum = " << sum << std::endl;
}

• Without std::sort(data, data + arraySize);, the code runs in 11.54 seconds.
• With the sorted data, the code runs in 1.93 seconds.

这个例子的现象是不经意的排序也可能大幅提升效率， 因为如果排序过了

if (data[c] >= 128)
    sum += data[c];

分支预测将会一直保持很高的正确率，所以节省了大量的时间，所以优化代码的时候要多多想想如何提升分支预测的正确率。