This question evaluates proficiency with bitwise operations, branchless programming, low-level performance optimizations, and microarchitectural reasoning about pipeline stalls, instruction-level parallelism, and cache behavior.

For an integer-heavy inner loop, propose bit-level optimizations that reduce branches and memory traffic: e.g., population count usage, fast modulo by power-of-two with masks, branchless conditional updates via bitwise selects, and alignment checks. Provide concise code examples, explain correctness, and analyze the microarchitectural impact (pipeline stalls, ILP, cache behavior).