CMOV is very important for high-performance programming as it greatly simplifies the design of branchless code. There are workarounds, but they either involve

CMOV is very important for high-performance programming as it greatly simplifies the design of branchless code. There are workarounds, but they either involve conditional branches (you don't want these) or increase the critical path latency significantly (the simplest workaround is to materialise the carry flag using SBB, then use that as a mask).