A Comparative Study of Branch Predictors

A branch predictor is the part of the processor that determines whether a conditional branch in the instruction flow of a program is likely to be taken or not. Almost all pipelined processors have branch predictors, because they must guess the address of the next instruction to fetch before the current conditional instruction has been executed [1]. Hence, attempts have been made to design accurate branch predictors. This project attempts at modeling different branch predictors and comparing their performances for a set of benchmarks.