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From looking at raw assembly code for a conventional processor you get the impression that things happen linearly and, as you say, “a register system would just branch and execute the code or not”. But looking at the code is thinking about the ‘programming model’, and is not actually how things execute under the hood so to speak.
And unfortunately there are catches; things don’t happen linearly (modern fast CPUs are “Out-of-Order”) and branches aren’t just to be taken cheaply. Branching – or rather, mispredicting a branch – is shockingly expensive, and OoO compounds that.
Modern CPUs have all introduced new op-codes to do “if-conversion”, although with mixed success. cmov
and kin are the new darling opcodes.
The Metadata talk describes speculation and is warmly recommended.