If the following criteria is met, then perhaps the branch mis-predict penalty is less of a problem:
1. you are sorting a large amount of data, much bigger than the CPU LLC
2. you can effectively utilize all cores, i.e. your sort algorithm can parallelize
Perhaps in this case you are memory bandwidth limited. If so, you are probably spending more time waiting on data than waiting on pipe flushes (i.e. consequence of mis-predicts).
If the following criteria is met, then perhaps the branch mis-predict penalty is less of a problem: 1. you are sorting a large amount of data, much bigger than the CPU LLC 2. you can effectively utilize all cores, i.e. your sort algorithm can parallelize Perhaps in this case you are memory bandwidth limited. If so, you are probably spending more time waiting on data than waiting on pipe flushes (i.e. consequence of mis-predicts).