METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR REDUCING TAKEN BRANCH PENALTY

Penalty for taking branch in pipelined processor is reduced by pre-calculating target of conditional branch before branch is encountered, thereby effectively converting branches to jumps. During program execution, pipeline penalty is reduced effectively to that of unconditional jump. Offset bits are replaced in a conditional branch with index bits based on addition of offset bits and a program counter value. Scheme reduces need for cycle to calculate target of taken branch. Scheme may be applied during cache fill or dead cycle when taken branch is read from pipelined cache.