Predication is an alternative to 🕊️ Branch Prediction that frames branches in a different way. Rather than jumping the PC, we’ll associate a predicate bit for each instruction; this bit indicates some condition, and it causes the instruction to run as normal or become NOP.
For example, with p1 as our predicate bit, we can perform addition or subtraction like:
slt p1, x1, x2
add.!p1 x3, x3, x4
sub.p1 x3, x3, x5
Predication introduces additional instructions, but it can be faster than prediction if this overhead is better than the misprediction penalty.