This is true, but the example given yesterday showed that even if branches can be very well predicted (e.g. processing UTF-8 text which is 99.9999% ASCII), branchless code can result in speedup by making autovectorisation possible.

If the branchless code didn't transform to vector instructions, it would be strictly slower. But if it does, it allows the CPU to work on 16 bytes at a time instead of 1 at a time.

https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/do...