1. An improved digital device including a memory means for storing a plurality of instructions arranged as a program with conditional branch instructions at respective locations in said program specifying conditions to be tested; an instruction prefetch means and an instruction execute means for respectively fetching and executing different instructions of said program at the same time in a pipelined fashion; said conditional branch instruction at each of said locations further having multiple encodings which predict the state of the condition to be tested; and a control means for detecting when said prefetch means has fetched one of said conditional branch instructions and for fetching the next instruction based on the predicted state of the condition to be tested and encoded in said fetched conditional branch instruction.