How does Java's switch work under the hood?

Neither. it uses the lookupswitch JVM instruction, which is essentially a table lookup. Take a look at the bytecode of the following example:

public static void main(String... args) {
  switch (1) {
  case 1:
    break;
  case 2:
    break;
  }
}

public static void main(java.lang.String[]);
  Code:
   Stack=1, Locals=1, Args_size=1
   0:   iconst_1
   1:   lookupswitch{ //2
                1: 28;
                2: 31;
                default: 31 }
   28:  goto    31
   31:  return

As you can see from this answer, Java switch (at least pre-1.7) does not always compile into == or .equals(). Instead, it uses table lookup. While this is a very small micro-optimization, when doing a great many comparisons, table lookup will almost always be faster.

Note that this is only used for switch statements that check against dense keys. For example, checking an enum value for all of its possibilities would probably yield this primary implementation (internally called tableswitch).

If checking against more sparsely-populated sets of keys, the JVM will use an alternative system, known as lookupswitch. It will instead simply compare various keys and values, doing essentially an optimized == comparison for each possibility. To illustrate these two methods, consider the following two switch statements:

switch (value1) {
case 0:
    a();
    break;
case 1:
    b();
    break;
case 2:
    c();
    break;
case 3:
    d();
    break;
}

switch (value2) {
case 0:
    a();
    break;
case 35:
    b();
    break;
case 103:
    c();
    break;
case 1001:
    d();
    break;
}

The first example would most likely use table lookup, while the other would (basically) use == comparison.

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In bytecode there are two forms of switch: tableswitch and lookupswitch. One assumes a dense set of keys, the other sparse. See the description of compiling switch in the JVM spec. For enums, the ordinal is found and then the code continues as the int case. I am not entirely sure how the proposed switch on String little feature in JDK7 will be implemented.

However, heavily used code is typically compiled in any sensible JVM. The optimiser is not entirely stupid. Don't worry about it, and follow the usual heuristics for optimisation.

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