Why switch is faster than if

Because there are special bytecodes that allow efficient switch statement evaluation when there are a lot of cases.

If implemented with IF-statements you would have a check, a jump to the next clause, a check, a jump to the next clause and so on. With switch the JVM loads the value to compare and iterates through the value table to find a match, which is faster in most cases.

A switch statement is not always faster than an if statement. It scales better than a long list of if-else statements as switch can perform a lookup based on all the values. However, for a short condition it won't be any faster and could be slower.