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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (151258)	12/5/2001 7:56:29 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Respond to of 186894

Joe, Re: "But to do the lookup, each single case needs to be examined, which is the variable here." That's what I assumed, at first. But then Kap mentioned that compilers are likely to set up some kind of a table for the switch statement. When the switch variable is calculated, it will be translated into a pointer for the next instruction. That's much more efficient than stepping through every case statement. However, it still requires a branch, and these branches will not be able to be predicted. Thus, if the processor makes a guess, fills the pipeline, and later finds out that it was incorrect, it will need to flush the pipeline, and begin over. For a longer pipeline, this will obviously mean far more latency. wbmw