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We found that approximately 32% of instruction blocks in a decoupled frontend do not contain branch instructions, while 30.8% of instruction blocks contain only conditional branches. However, because the type of instructions within a block cannot be determined during prediction, branch prediction must be executed every cycle. In this work, we propose the next block type (NBT) and no branch sequence table (NST) for predicting instruction block types. These mechanisms occupy minimal space and are straightforward to implement. For a four\u2010way out\u2010of\u2010order processor, the NBT and NST reduce the branch predictor\u2019s energy consumption by 52.36% and processor\u2019s energy consumption by 4.1% without sacrificing the processor\u2019s instructions per cycle (IPC) and branch prediction accuracy.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1049\/cdt2\/3359419","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,4,30]],"date-time":"2025-04-30T22:03:47Z","timestamp":1746050627000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1002\/crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Energy\u2010Efficient Branch Predictor via Instruction Block Type Prediction in Decoupled Frontend"],"prefix":"10.1049","volume":"2025","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0004-2120-6523","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zilin","family":"Li","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3040-6859","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jizeng","family":"Wei","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Shuangsheng","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yaogong","family":"Yang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"265","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,4,30]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_10_1_2","unstructured":"LeeC.-C. 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