Branch Prediction and Speculative Execution

Published at 1999 × 1407 in An accessible overview of Meltdown and Spectre, Part 2
Figure 1: How branch misprediction leads to speculative execution. When the branch predictor makes an incorrect guess about the destination of a conditional branch, some instructions are speculatively executed. The execution of these instructions is undone, but their effects on the cache remain. Spectre causes the branch predictor to guess wrong and speculatively execute a carefully chosen set of instructions.

Figure 1: How branch misprediction leads to speculative execution. When the branch predictor makes an incorrect guess about the destination of a conditional branch, some instructions are speculatively executed. The execution of these instructions is undone, but their effects on the cache remain. Spectre causes the branch predictor to guess wrong and speculatively execute a carefully chosen set of instructions.

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