The Zicond extension defines a simple solution that provides most of the benefit and all of the flexibility one would desire to support conditional arithmetic and conditional-select/move operations, while remaining true to the RISC-V design philosophy. The instructions follow the format for R-type instructions with 3 operands (i.e., 2 source operands and 1 destination operand). Using these instructions, branchless sequences can be implemented (typically in two-instruction sequences) without the need for instruction fusion, special provisions during the decoding of architectural instructions, or other microarchitectural provisions.
One of the shortcomings of RISC-V, compared to competing instruction set architectures, is the absence of conditional operations to support branchless code-generation: this includes conditional arithmetic, conditional select and conditional move operations. The design principles of RISC-V (e.g. the absence of an instruction-format that supports 3 source registers and an output register) make it unlikely that direct equivalents of the competing instructions will be introduced.
Yet, low-cost conditional instructions are a desirable feature as they allow the replacement of branches in a broad range of suitable situations (whether the branch turns out to be unpredictable or predictable) so as to reduce the capacity and aliasing pressures on BTBs and branch predictors, and to allow for longer basic blocks (for both the hardware and the compiler to work with).