This is the exact phenomenon behind the famous 'why is processing a sorted array faster than an unsorted array' Stack Overflow question, one of the most-viewed posts in the site's history, and it's why high-performance libraries like Google's Abseil deliberately write branchless comparison code for hot paths. A 15-20 cycle misprediction penalty per iteration, multiplied across billions of iterations, is a routine 5-10x real-world slowdown that shows up constantly in production profiling.