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Re:BOOM Open Source RISC-V Core Runs on Amazon EC2 F1 Instances by wolf550e on Thursday December 13, 2018 @12:53PM (#18674372)
Note that even an in-order processor that is pipelined and has a branch predictor to not stall the pipeline on every conditional branch does "speculative execution" (branch predictor can guess wrong and flushing the pipeline is required).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor#History

Re:BOOM Open Source RISC-V Core Runs on Amazon EC2 F1 Instances by brucehoult on Thursday December 13, 2018 @09:53PM (#18678069)
Sort of. Later instructions are fetched and decoded speculatively, but because the processor is in-order they don't get to the execute stage (let alone write-back) before the misprediction is discovered. All that has to be flushed is the fetch and decode, which doesn't change any visible state anyway. (hmm .. except icache contents .. the mispredicted branch might evict something else from the icache .. but the load from L2 or main memory will probably take longer than the pipeline length, so could be shot down before updating the icache)