That's an interesting perspective. I always thought that cmov was more important if the CPU had really bad branch prediction - the MIPS CPUs that were in the PS

That's an interesting perspective. I always thought that cmov was more important if the CPU had really bad branch prediction - the MIPS CPUs that were in the PS2 and PSP had famously bad branch prediction; there were all sorts of interesting cases where we could manually recode using cmov to avoid mispredictions in hot-path code. But I guess if the compiler knew enough about the branch prediction strategy employed by the CPU, it could do this optimization itself when prediction wouldn't work right, even on a CPU with good prediction.