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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.
CITATION STYLE
Kaligosi, K., & Sanders, P. (2006). How branch mispredictions affect quicksort. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 4168 LNCS, pp. 780–791). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/11841036_69
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.