I remember listening to one of the Lex Fridman interviews with Jim Keller where he said that modern branch prediction in CPUs was now done by “neural nets” in silicon. Does anyone here have any insight into this?
If you search “AMD Zen neural branch prediction” you’ll find several references to this, but very few details. I dunno if perceptrons really count as “neural nets” these days since it’s just a weighted average. Lots of computations are technically neural nets if we use such broad definitions.
It’d be pretty cool to see an x86 language model in future CPUs. I have no doubt that compute will continue to scale faster than memory access and the relative cost of pipeline stalls will never go down.
