You miss out on branch prediction. There's a bit of a myth that branches are always bad because a branch misprediction is slower than a correctly predicted bran

You miss out on branch prediction. There's a bit of a myth that branches are always bad because a branch misprediction is slower than a correctly predicted branch and therefore no branches are better. A bit of code that eliminates branches but has dependant variables (A must be computed before B can be computed) will have pipeline stalls while the computation for A is completed. Yes it might be faster than a branch misprediction but it will never be as fast as a correctly predicted branch (which takes effectively 0 cycles). Notice the one thing missing in this post? Benchmarks!