Embedded programming state machines
I'd be surprised if there's a big difference on a 32-bit MCU. Avoiding conditional branches could save you a few cycles, but are you really going to succeed or fail based on a few cycles? The number of wait states on your RAM and ROM are probably at least as important. So is the CPU instruction set.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Start with what's easier to implement and maintain, and only optimize where necessary based on profiling.