[sukuriant]

"will cost at most 5 clock cycles in a single-thread pipeline"

Being a little pedantic here: you can't safely say this part without knowing which kind of branch predictions the processor uses; and, more importantly, how deep the branch prediction can go. There are some processors that will branch predict once ... and then again, and again and again. The first one they get wrong, they have to roll back to that first one. But then, you're right. The more times that single method is called, depending on the implementation of branch prediction, the more often it's going to be right, and so as long as those values aren't changing often (I don't see why they would in the case we're trying to suggest), it may eventually fade into nothing.

Needs moar testing!