Why is (a*b != 0) faster than (a != 0 && b != 0) in Java?

I’m ignoring the issue that your benchmarking might be flawed, and taking the result at face value.

Is it the compiler or is it at the hardware level?

That latter, I think:

  if (a != 0 && b != 0)

will compile to 2 memory loads and two conditional branches

  if (a * b != 0)

will compile to 2 memory loads, a multiply and one conditional branch.

The multiply is likely to be faster than the second conditional branch if the hardware-level branch prediction is ineffective. As you increase the ratio … the branch prediction is becoming less effective.

The reason that conditional branches are slower is that they cause the instruction execution pipeline to stall. Branch prediction is about avoiding the stall by predicting which way the branch is going to go and speculatively choosing the next instruction based on that. If the prediction fails, there is a delay while the instruction for the other direction is loaded.

(Note: the above explanation is oversimplified. For a more accurate explanation, you need to look at the literature provided by the CPU manufacturer for assembly language coders and compiler writers. The Wikipedia page on Branch Predictors is good background.)

However, there is one thing that you need to be careful about with this optimization. Are there any values where a * b != 0 will give the wrong answer? Consider cases where computing the product results in integer overflow.

UPDATE

Your graphs tend to confirm what I said.

• There is also a “branch prediction” effect in the conditional branch a * b != 0 case, and this comes out in the graphs.

• If you project the curves beyond 0.9 on the X-axis, it looks like 1) they will meet at about 1.0 and 2) the meeting point will be at roughly the same Y value as for X = 0.0.

UPDATE 2

I don’t understand why the curves are different for the a + b != 0 and the a | b != 0 cases. There could be something clever in the branch predictors logic. Or it could indicate something else.

(Note that this kind of thing can be specific to a particular chip model number or even version. The results of your benchmarks could be different on other systems.)

However, they both have the advantage of working for all non-negative values of a and b.