[paulfr]

The grant is for the DAL project [1], which presumably fits the "ground-breaking, high-risk" label. In such a project, some tasks will be high-risk, some tasks will be low-risk. Quantifying the branch predictor of current processors may be a comparatively easy task, but that doesn't mean it's trivial, useless or outside the scope of the project, which is to improve sequential performance of microarchitectures. Knowing that real-world processors are performing just as well as previous academic research is helpful, because it suggests that there is no difficulty or unrealistic assumption that prevented manufacturers from doing so. Conveying that knowledge to the compiler and interpreter community is important too.

[1] https://team.inria.fr/alf/members/andre-seznec/defying-amdah...