vector conditionmask = <some computation...>; // E.g., 11111111 00000000 00000000 11111111
vector truebranch = <some computation...>;
vector falsebranch = <some computation...>;
vector result = (truebranch & conditionmask) | (falsebranch & ~conditionmask);
where each lane of the conditionmask has either all bits set or all bits clear, depending on the outcome of the conditional test for that lane.The processor obviously does execute both branches here, so there's going to be wasted work. But since it's just a linear sequence of operations it can often schedule them independently and run them out-of-order and in parallel. And of course, if there's any shared computation between the two branches, the compiler can do common subexpression elimination.
That said, that sort of approach where you go ahead and do both and then blend them was definitely the kind of optimization where you'd want to profile rather than doing it blindly. But it was a pretty common thing to do when hand-vectorizing code. (Thankfully, auto-vectorizers are pretty good at doing this sort of optimization for you these days. It's been a very long time now since I've had to hand-write vector intrinsics.)
If you want to tell the Rust compiler that you're certain a branch predictor can't help here [be very sure, most often humans are wrong which is why historically these "I know better than the branch predictor" features get ignored by optimisers] you can core::hint::select_unpredictable(condition, a, b) rather than using a dedicated operator.
† That's not its actual name, some languages have an operator with three operands which does something else, such as fused multiply-add so in a multi-lingual context better to say explicitly you mean the ternary conditional operator.