Nops do not hit the backend. And conditional branches do eventually make their way to the backend—at some point, you have to actually check that the condition

Nops do not hit the backend. And conditional branches do eventually make their way to the backend—at some point, you have to actually check that the condition was satisfied. Refer to agner (https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf): on intel, conditional jumps can be filled by ports 0 and 6.