Microbenchmarking Return Address Branch Prediction « Blog
Modern processors use branch predictors to predict a program’s control flow in order to execute further ahead in the instruction stream, for better performance. Function return instructions usually use a specialized branch predictor called a Return Address Stack (RAS), Return Stack Buffer (RSB), return stack, or other various names. This article presents a series of increasingly complex microbenchmarks to measure the behaviour of the RAS found in several Intel and AMD processor microarchitecture...
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