[gmueckl]

Associative memory is a huge matrix of and gates in the comparator. But we are talking about buffering results of speculated reads after a predicted branch.

The density if load instructions in code is not particularly high on average. Also, all loads are subject to the same latencies, so that the chance that a speculative read completes before the blocking one is also low (must be cached in a higher level cache, I think).

Taken together, I would be surprised if more than about 10 speculative reads can successfully complete at all in that time frame, even though it is hundreds of cycles. So that would be around 1000 and gates and 1000 memory cells. Doesn't sound too big to me.