You can’t reasonably even talk about the “speed” of operations in isolation. You can discuss their latency in isolation (in which case a branch or cmov, on ave

You can’t reasonably even talk about the “speed” of operations in isolation. You can discuss their latency in isolation (in which case a branch or cmov, on average, really is faster than some ALU operations), but that has essentially nothing to do with their actual impact on performance in situ, except for in the most unusual cases. Throughput is somewhat more reasonable, but then large parts of the hierarchy collapse entirely. A more reasonable approach is to think about resource (ALU, LSU, branch, cache, etc) pressure, but that doesn’t fit nicely into a soundbite and requires actual thought.