Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

[JumpingJack]

Branches are done i all software. You do it all the time. conditions and loops are everywhere. I think that games tries to avoid these in order to gain speed. That is a trick I do when I need better performance. Align data is also common and that has the same speed target, to have one single flow of data

Do you know how the branch prediction works on K10?

Yeah, there is lots of literature on in the branch predictors for both K10 and Core...

Branches in software are generated by code, branch predictors attempt to predict which branch will be true and loads that block of code into the pipeline... branch prediction is entirely in the hardware and is a hard wired logical algorithm intended to increase IPC. This is a fundamental comp sci topic, you need to do some research.

EDIT: However, game code contains more conditional logic than say 'encoding' or 'rendering' code ... hang tight, I have several papers that document the number of branches for different code types somehwere. Games are the highest, and this is where strong branch prediction shines, hence the reason Intel whollops AMD in gaming code.

Intel's branch prediction algorithms are much stronger than AMD's.

jack