[striking]

I think now branch prediction on processors can go either way, just as long as it's biased one way or another. If it's not biased one way or another, try to reduce out branches into vectorizable instructions (or pray that GCC takes care of it for you).

Branch prediction isn't a GCC thing, it's a processor thing.

Observe this wonderful Stack Overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processin...