Re: Reverse engineering of Intel branch predictors

I guess for small jump table that would work well, indeed, but for
something like a bytecode interpreter, even if you can compact it to
have only 16bit per entry, that still spans 512B.  Is your IB large
enough for that?

For something like a bytecode interpreter, the prediction accuracy
of the jump predictor is going to be epically bad.

Current Intel processors do a surprisingly good job of it.

I'm guessing this is the branch pattern recognizer at work, i.e some
sequences of bytecode ops are much more common than a simple random walk
through the opcodes, and those sequences make it possible to predict the
next bytecode jump to be performed?

Yes.  If you consider the two levels of language at play (the CPU view
at the level of machine language and the interpreter's view of the
bytecode language), IIUC the branch history of the CPU view ends up
being a usable approximation of the bytecode-level instruction pointer,
so for those sections of your bytecode-level program which are sufficiently
repetitive, the prediction applied by the CPU can correctly predict the
next bytecode.


        Stefan