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Conference Paper

How Branch Mispredictions Affect Quicksort

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Kaligosi,  Kanela
Algorithms and Complexity, MPI for Informatics, Max Planck Society;

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Sanders,  Peter
Algorithms and Complexity, MPI for Informatics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Kaligosi, K., & Sanders, P. (2006). How Branch Mispredictions Affect Quicksort. In Algorithms - ESA 2006, 14th Annual European Symposium (pp. 780-791). Berlin, Germany: Springer.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-2318-D
Abstract
We explain the counterintuitive observation that finding “good” pivots (close to the median of the array to be partitioned) may not improve performance of quicksort. Indeed, an intentionally skewed pivot improves performance. The reason is that while the instruction count decreases with the quality of the pivot, the likelihood that the direction of a branch is mispredicted also goes up. We analyze the effect of simple branch prediction schemes and measure the effects on real hardware.