Restoring speculative history used for making speculative predictions for instructions processed in a processor employing control independence techniques

A method of restoring speculative history used for making one or more speculative predictions for conditional control instructions in a processor, comprising:

• speculatively predicting a condition in a first conditional control instruction in an instruction stream in a first instruction pipeline based on a first speculative prediction history indicator;
• speculatively predicting a condition of one or more first control dependent (CD) conditional control instructions in a first CD instruction region following the first conditional control instruction in the instruction stream;
• speculatively predicting a condition of one or more first control independent (CI) conditional control instructions in a CI instruction region following the first CD instruction region in the instruction stream;
• updating one or more first CI prediction entries of the first speculative prediction history indicator based on the respective speculative prediction of the one or more first CI conditional control instructions in the CI instruction region;
• executing the first conditional control instruction to resolve the condition of the first conditional control instruction;
• and
• in response to the speculative prediction of the first conditional control instruction not matching the resolved condition in execution of the first conditional control instruction:
• storing the one or more first CI prediction entries of the first speculative prediction history indicator;
• fetching one or more second CD conditional control instructions in a second CD instruction region of the first conditional control instruction based on the resolved condition of the first conditional control instruction;
• speculatively predicting a condition of the one or more second CD conditional control instructions in the second CD instruction region;
• and
• restoring the stored one or more first CI prediction entries of the first speculative prediction history indicator in the first speculative prediction history indicator.