Read a little further down to WiSaGaN's answer. There's an excellent discussion of the optimizations afforded by the cmovge instruction that is typically genera

Read a little further down to WiSaGaN's answer. There's an excellent discussion of the optimizations afforded by the cmovge instruction that is typically generated for the C ternary operator and how its implementation in the CPU pipeline allows it to avoid the branch misprediction penalty. He references a textbook as well "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (2nd Edition)". Just bought a copy.