“Avoid branches” isn’t strictly true in scalar code (and sometimes vector code) - zero folding leads to longer dependency chains, so if your branch is very pred

“Avoid branches” isn’t strictly true in scalar code (and sometimes vector code) - zero folding leads to longer dependency chains, so if your branch is very predictable and doesn’t preclude other optimizations (I.e. vectorizing) the branch can be faster. You mileage may vary, depending on how much reordering capacity the hardware has, how good the branch predictor is, how expensive a mispredict is, whether the extra dependency chains are impactful, etc.