Advantages
The main purpose of predication is to avoid jumps over very small sections of program code, increasing the effectiveness of pipelined execution and avoiding problems with the cache. It also has a number of more subtle benefits:
- Functions that are traditionally computed using simple arithmetic and bitwise operations may be quicker to compute using predicated instructions.
- Predicated instructions with different predicates can be mixed with each other and with unconditional code, allowing better instruction scheduling and so even better performance.
- Elimination of unnecessary branch instructions can make the execution of necessary branches, such as those that make up loops, faster by lessening the load on branch prediction mechanisms.
Read more about this topic: Branch Predication
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