The whole point of the article is that this is largely a myth imposed by the memory model of C and C-like languages. Single-threaded heavily branching workloads would be atrociously slow on modern CPUs, if not for branch prediction (which caused Spectre). On modern processors, you have 180 instructions running in one thread.
The processor is doing an ok job filling these instructions, but a language and compiler can do a much better job. C doesn't collect any information about data dependencies, and instead just pretends all instructions are sequential. Even code which contains tight loops of sequential commands can be optimized, because you have an entire program and operating system running around that sequential code.
The processor is doing an ok job filling these instructions, but a language and compiler can do a much better job. C doesn't collect any information about data dependencies, and instead just pretends all instructions are sequential. Even code which contains tight loops of sequential commands can be optimized, because you have an entire program and operating system running around that sequential code.