If you have perf critical branches in your code, you should try and make them as predictable as possible. Sometimes that means using a different approach that is algorithmically worse, but has much more predictable branches.

Classic example is linear search is faster than binary search for “small” lists. The item == myItem branch is only taken once at the end. Meanwhile binary search will take the branches of it’s comparison (item < myItem, item > myItem) in equal proportion to each other, so the branch predictor is stuck at a 50% guess for that branch. There is a great talk on this but I can’t remember what it’s called...