How do you measure the effect of branch misprediction?
branch, c++
Solution
Look it up in the docs for your CPU. If you can't find this information specifically, the length of the CPU's pipeline is a fairly good estimate.
Given that it's MIPS and it's a 300MHz system, I'm going to guess that it's a fairly short pipeline. Probably 4-5 stages, so a cost of 3-4 cycles per mispredict is probably a reasonable guess.
Problem
I'm currently profiling an implementation of binary search. Using some special instructions to measure this I noticed that the code has about a 20% misprediction rate. I'm curious if there is any way to check how many cycles I'm potentially losing due to this. It's a MIPS based architecture.