Another way to see this is that the &#x27;branchy&#x27; version can have multiple loads pending at the same time. This is a big win for non L1-cached loads.<p>Cmov forces each load to depend on the previous one, so you will have only one load pending at any time.<p>With a 50% misprediction rate, the Nth load has only 0.5<i></i>N probability of actually committing, but it is still better than just having a single load in flight.