Branches are still valuable in many cases but it can be valuable, situationally, to replace them with things like cmovs instead. You'll need to benchmark it to

Branches are still valuable in many cases but it can be valuable, situationally, to replace them with things like cmovs instead. You'll need to benchmark it to be sure - it's not like the old days where branches were always worse. Branch hoisting, on the other hand, is a win like 90% or more of the time (I can imagine it being a loss if it causes stuff to fall out of icache), which is why most compilers will try to do it automatically. Worse than branches (generally) are indirect calls (i.e. virtual methods, function pointers) that don't predict well, so you especially want to avoid those in tight loops and if you can't avoid them you want to sort your data so that the call target doesn't change frequently.