Yea, I get that the actual comparison instruction itself is insignificant. It's everything that goes along with it. Seems like quaternary is fetching more data, however.

For instance, if you have 8 elements, 01234567, and you're looking for 1, with binary, you'd fetch 4, 2, and then 1. With quaternary, you'd fetch 2, 4, 6, then 1. Obviously, if you only have 8 elements, you'd just delegate to the SIMD instruction, but if this was a much larger array, you'd be doing more work.

I guess on a modern processor, eliminating the data dependency is worth it because the processor's branch prediction and speculation only follows effectively a single path.

Would be interesting to see this at a machine cycle level on a real processor to understand exactly what is happening.