Branch Prediction

I accidentally came across the following question¹ (and consequent answer) on StackOverflow, and it is awesome!

I knew these things existed, but never put two and two together.

Unfortunately, of course, if you have to sort the array prior to the work to gain the speed, you're unlikely to speed up the process "in total".

References

[1] StackOverflow - Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array

Wikipedia - Branch predictor

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