Is it possible to tell the branch predictor how likely it is to follow the branch?

Yes, but it will have no effect. Exceptions are older (obsolete) architectures pre Netburst, and even then it doesn't do anything measurable.

There is an "branch hint" opcode Intel introduced with the Netburst architecture, and a default static branch prediction for cold jumps (backward predicted taken, forward predicted non taken) on some older architectures. GCC implements this with the __builtin_expect (x, prediction), where prediction is typically 0 or 1.The opcode emitted by the compiler is ignored on all newer processor architecures (>= Core 2). The small corner case where this actually does something is the case of a cold jump on the old Netburst architecture. Intel recommends now not to use the static branch hints, probably because they consider the increase of the code size more harmful than the possible marginal speed up.

Besides the useless branch hint for the predictor, __builtin_expect has its use, the compiler may reorder the code to improve cache usage or save memory.

There are multiple reasons it doesn't work as expected.

• The processor can predict small loops (n<64) perfectly.
• The processor can predict small repeating patterns (n~7) perfectly.
• The processor itself can estimate the probability of a branch during runtime better than the compiler/programmer during compile time.
• The predictability (= probability a branch will get predicted correctly) of a branch is far more important than the probability that the branch is taken. Unfortunately, this is highly architecture-dependent, and predicting the predictability of branch is notoriously hard.

Read more about the inner works of the branch prediction at Agner Fogs manuals.See also the gcc mailing list.

Yes. http://kerneltrap.org/node/4705

The __builtin_expect is a method that gcc (versions >= 2.96) offer for programmers to indicate branch prediction information to the compiler. The return value of __builtin_expect is the first argument (which could only be an integer) passed to it.

if (__builtin_expect (x, 0))                foo ();     [This] would indicate that we do not expect to call `foo', since we     expect `x' to be zero. 

Pentium 4 (aka Netburst microarchitecture) had branch-predictor hints as prefixes to the jcc instructions, but only P4 ever did anything with them. See http://ref.x86asm.net/geek32.html. AndSection 3.5 of Agner Fog's excellent asm opt guide, from http://www.agner.org/optimize/. He has a guide to optimizing in C++, too.

Earlier and later x86 CPUs silently ignore those prefix bytes. Are there any performance test results for usage of likely/unlikely hints? mentions that PowerPC has some jump instructions which have a branch-prediction hint as part of the encoding. It's a pretty rare architectural feature. Statically predicting branches at compile time is very hard to do accurately, so it's usually better to leave it up to hardware to figure it out.

Not much is officially published about exactly how the branch predictors and branch-target-buffers in the most recent Intel and AMD CPUs behave. The optimization manuals (easy to find on AMD's and Intel's web sites) give some advice, but don't document specific behaviour. Some people have run tests to try to divine the implementation, e.g. how many BTB entries Core2 has... Anyway, the idea of hinting the predictor explicitly has been abandoned (for now).

What is documented is for example that Core2 has a branch history buffer that can avoid mispredicting the loop-exit if the loop always runs a constant short number of iterations, < 8 or 16 IIRC. But don't be too quick to unroll, because a loop that fits in 64bytes (or 19uops on Penryn) won't have instruction fetch bottlenecks because it replays from a buffer... go read Agner Fog's pdfs, they're excellent.

See also Why did Intel change the static branch prediction mechanism over these years? : Intel since Sandybridge doesn't use static prediction at all, as far as we can tell from performance experiments that attempt to reverse-engineer what CPUs do. (Many older CPUs have static prediction as a fallback when dynamic prediction misses. The normal static prediction is forward branches are not-taken and backward branches are taken (because backwards branches are often loop branches).)

The effect of likely()/unlikely() macros using GNU C's __builtin_expect (like Drakosha's answer mentions) does not directly insert BP hints into the asm. (It might possibly do so with gcc -march=pentium4, but not when compiling for anything else).

The actual effect is to lay out the code so the fast path has fewer taken branches, and perhaps fewer instructions total. This will help branch prediction in cases where static prediction comes into play (e.g. dynamic predictors are cold, on CPUs which do fall back to static prediction instead of just letting branches alias each other in the predictor caches.)

See What is the advantage of GCC's __builtin_expect in if else statements? for a specific example of code-gen.

Taken branches cost slightly more than not-taken branches, even when predicted perfectly. When the CPU fetches code in chunks of 16 bytes to decode in parallel, a taken branch means that later instructions in that fetch block aren't part of the instruction stream to be executed. It creates bubbles in the front-end which can become a bottleneck in high-throughput code (which doesn't stall in the back-end on cache-misses, and has high instruction-level parallelism).

Jumping around between different blocks also potentially touches more cache-lines of code, increasing L1i cache footprint and maybe causing more instruction-cache misses if it was cold. (And potentially uop-cache footprint). So that's another advantage to having the fast path be short and linear.

GCC's profile-guided optimization normally makes likely/unlikely macros unnecessary. The compiler collects run-time data on which way each branch went for code-layout decisions, and to identify hot vs. cold blocks / functions. (e.g. it will unroll loops in hot functions but not cold functions.) See -fprofile-generate and -fprofile-use in the GCC manual. How to use profile guided optimizations in g++?

Otherwise GCC has to guess using various heuristics, if you didn't use likely/unlikely macros and didn't use PGO. -fguess-branch-probability is enabled by default at -O1 and higher.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gcc-82-pgo&num=1 has benchmark results for PGO vs. regular with gcc8.2 on a Xeon Scalable Server CPU. (Skylake-AVX512). Every benchmark got at least a small speedup, and some benefited by ~10%. (Most of that is probably from loop unrolling in hot loops, but some of it is presumably from better branch layout and other effects.)