A history of branch prediction from 1500000 BC to 1995

https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/

One way you might design a CPU is to have the CPU do all of the work for one instruction, then move on to the next instruction, do all of the work for the next instruction, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with this; a lot of older CPUs did this, and some modern very low-cost CPUs still do this. But if you want to make a faster CPU, you might make a CPU that works like an assembly line. That is, you break the CPU up into two parts, so that half the CPU can do the “front half” of the work for an instruction while half the CPU works on the “back half” of the work for an instruction, like an assembly line. This is typically called a pipelined CPU.