And to make it more complicated, both "regular" ifs and ternaries may not generate a branch at all, e.g. by using the CMOV (conditional move) instruction on x86

And to make it more complicated, both "regular" ifs and ternaries may not generate a branch at all, e.g. by using the CMOV (conditional move) instruction on x86. This avoids a branch but can obviously not eliminate the data dependency between the condition and a later consumer of the result.