Based on the title, I knew the issue as soon as I looked at the first table. Still, great primer for those who don't know about such CPU shenanigans, and I did appreciate the solution, since I knew high level how to solve it, but didn't come up with an actual piece of code before the author presented theirs.

I didn't know about branch prediction or pipelined CPUs back when I was profiling the code I wrote - honestly it probably would have helped.