If they are not in the critical path, it doesn't matter. There is no instruction cache issues as the loop is tiny. Also as the loop is tiny it will fit in the u-op cache (or even in the loop cache), so decoding is not an issue either. The only problem is potential lack of vectorization, but a good vector ISA can in principle handle the bound checking with masked reads and writes (but now the check is no longer a predictable branch, but it might end up in the critical path, although it is not necessarily a big cost, or even measurable, anyway).

I am by no means an expert, but I believe what you have in mind would likely fit in i-cache without a problem, so you wouldn’t see a significant difference.

There is an interesting talk titled ‘the death of optimizing compilers’ that argues that for most code these optimizations are almost completely meaningless, and in the hot loops where it actually matters, they are not good compared to humans (and sometimes 100x or more improvements are possible and left on the table). While I don’t completely agree with its points, it is a good talk/slides to read through.