TLDR Tech / DevOps
When branchless binary search is slower
Branchless binary search is often presented as a faster alternative because it eliminates branch mispredictions, but it can perform worse when memory latency dominates execution time. Benchmarks show that standard binary search benefits from speculative execution and hardware prefetching, allowing CPUs to begin fetching multiple possible memory locations before branch outcomes are known, while branchless implementations serialize dependent memory accesses and reduce memory-level parallelism despite having more predictable control flow.
Read the full story