It does, but it may run out of non-dependent instructions to execute while waiting for the long pole of the cmov dependency chain to finish.

This used to be a problem on Pentium4 where cmov had high latency (4 cycles or more), but today, IIRC, a register-to-register cmov is only one cycle, so it is safe to use whenever a branch could have a non-trivial misprediction rate.

Just looked it up. Yes, from Broadwell forward a reg to reg cmov has latency 1. On Atom processors it is still 6.

If you decrement your array index you don't even need the cmp instruction. The compiler could probably gen so good code.