[anticleiades]

branch-less programming is a fascinating area. you have used -O3. Possibly, the compiler is also vectorizing some parts of the code. I am curious to know the contribution of AVX/SIMD to the speed-up (i.e, how much speed-up avoiding branches "alone" yields)

[chkas]

You can take a look at this - it's fast even without vector operations, as long as you avoid the branches that are often predicted incorrectly.

https://easylang.online/blog/branchless