I am looking at the list of branch events for Ivy Bridge and when finding their descriptions I come across the following terms:
"near branches"
"macro branches"
"taken speculative"
What are the first two and what does the third mean? I thought the idea is to "predict" a branch, so I am unsure what the "speculative" means here?
The events in question are:
BR_MISP_RETIRED.NEAR_TAKEN
BR_MISP_RETIRED.ALL_BRANCHES
BR_INST_EXEC.TAKEN_INDIRECT_NEAR_CALL