title: Is it possible to tell the branch predictor how likely it is to follow the branch?
body: <p>Just to make it clear, I'm not going for any sort of portability here, so any solutions that will tie me to a certain box is fine.</p>
  
  <p>Basically, I have an if statement that will 99% of the time evaluate to true, and am trying to eke out every last clock of performance, can I issue some sort of compiler command (using GCC 4.1.2 and the x86 ISA, if it matters) to tell the branch predictor that it should cache for that branch?</p>