> This is called branch prediction, it has been the source of many fun security issues...
No, that's speculative execution you just described. Branch prediction was implemented long before out-of-order CPUs were a thing, as you need branch prediction to make the most of pipelining (eg. fetching and decoding a new instruction while you're still executing the previous one--if you predict branches, you're more likely to keep the pipeline full).
No, that's speculative execution you just described. Branch prediction was implemented long before out-of-order CPUs were a thing, as you need branch prediction to make the most of pipelining (eg. fetching and decoding a new instruction while you're still executing the previous one--if you predict branches, you're more likely to keep the pipeline full).