I was quite curious as to this, so I looked into the code (using GCC 4.4.5 on a 32-bit VM). Switch statements can be optimized in 2 ways (doing a binary search - log n checks/jumps, or doing a jump table, no checks and 2 jumps). Usually the jump table is done for dense cases and binary search for sparse cases.

I will post the disassembly of the code as-is first. Then the same exact code but using a switch statement (change all the if/else into a 'case' and nothing else).

// loop header (break out of loop if we hit END)
1a: 8b 04 99 mov eax,DWORD PTR [ecx+ebx*4]
1d: 83 f8 ff cmp eax,0xffffffff
20: 0f 84 62 01 00 00 je 188 <run_vm+0x188>
26: 89 fa mov edx,edi
// inside of the loop begins here (theres a jmp 28 instruction at the bottom that i omitted here)
28: 8b 52 0c mov edx,DWORD PTR [edx+0xc]
// now edx == &vm->pProgram->args
// FAIL: vm->pProgram->args is loop invariant and shouldn't be reloaded every iteration
// this is either a failure to prove the load was redundant or a failure to allocate this its own register without spilling
2b: 83 f8 01 cmp eax,0x1
// why is this here? instruction scheduling magic probably.
2e: 8b 14 32 mov edx,DWORD PTR [edx+esi*1]
// esi is the instr_idx
// new edx is vm->pProgram->args[instr_idx]
31: 8b 32 mov esi,DWORD PTR [edx]
// esi is arg0 == vm->pProgram->args[instr_idx][0]
33: 8b 52 04 mov edx,DWORD PTR [edx+0x4]
// edx is arg1 == vm->pProgram->args[instr_idx][1]
36: 89 55 d4 mov DWORD PTR [ebp-0x2c],edx
// FAIL: spill vm->pProgram->args[instr_idx] to stack.
// why is this a fail? it's already on the stack, so we can reconstruct it slightly slower without spilling
39: 0f 84 01 01 00 00 je 140 <run_vm+0x140>
// finally the je for the cmp

// CMP/JE pairs for ELSE IFs follow until end
3f: 83 f8 02 cmp eax,0x2
42: 0f 84 48 01 00 00 je 190 <run_vm+0x190>
48: 83 f8 03 cmp eax,0x3
4b: 0f 84 5f 01 00 00 je 1b0 <run_vm+0x1b0>
51: 83 f8 04 cmp eax,0x4
54: 0f 84 0e 01 00 00 je 168 <run_vm+0x168>
5a: 83 f8 05 cmp eax,0x5
5d: 8d 76 00 lea esi,[esi+0x0]
60: 0f 84 12 01 00 00 je 178 <run_vm+0x178>
66: 83 f8 06 cmp eax,0x6
69: 0f 84 61 01 00 00 je 1d0 <run_vm+0x1d0>
6f: 83 f8 07 cmp eax,0x7
72: 0f 84 70 01 00 00 je 1e8 <run_vm+0x1e8>
78: 83 f8 08 cmp eax,0x8

eax is the bytecode for the current instruction (vm->pProgram->args[instr_idx]). Notice that the first time it inlines the code (for the MOV instruction). The rest of the time it's a cmp/jcc pair (I omitted the rest of the asm for clarity, but it's cmp/jcc all the way down).

So that alone makes it that a MOV bytecode would get executed almost right away. Then for everything else, PUSH, POP, etc you have to go through a linearly increasing sets of cmp/jcc pairs. So in this case if the probability distribution of your interpreted program meant that most opcodes were MOV, PUSH, POP, you could get pretty good performance. But once it goes through a few cmp/jcc pairs you have lost the performance benefit of using if/else, it will get slower than using a switch.

There are also a few potential fails here (look at my FAIL comments). The value for &vm->pProgram->args gets recalculated every loop iteration, this is probably a register allocation fail (not enough registers on x86). And vm->pProgram->args[instr_idx] gets spilled to stack. That's really annoying and probably unnecessary.

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Now let's take a look at the switch statement! I was curious to see if it would generate a binary search table or a jump table. In theory it should be the latter since the opcodes are 0-25 inclusive (with -1 for END, which is actually 0xFFFFFFFF and is not easily a candidate to become a jump table member).
x

//loop header
1a: 8b 04 99 mov eax,DWORD PTR [ecx+ebx*4]
1d: 83 f8 ff cmp eax,0xffffffff
20: 74 48 je 6a <run_vm+0x6a>
22: 8d b6 00 00 00 00 lea esi,[esi+0x0]
// loop beginning (there's an omitted jmp 28 lower on)
28: 8b 7e 0c mov edi,DWORD PTR [esi+0xc]
// now edi == &vm->pProgram->args
// FAIL: vm->pProgram->args is loop invariant and shouldn't be reloaded every iteration
// this is either a failure to prove the load was redundant or a failure to allocate this its own register without spilling
2b: 83 f8 19 cmp eax,0x19
// compare eax to 25 (JLE)
// compiler was unable to prove that the instruction is in the range [-1, 25]. this will always cause a >25 check every loop iteration (bad)
// i wanted to try adding a __builtin_unreachable() as a default switch case to fix this, unfortunately i don't have gcc 4.5
// also maybe doing a switch on eax & 0x20 so it knows its less than 32, 32 might be small enough to generate 7 blank jump table entries
2e: 8b 14 17 mov edx,DWORD PTR [edi+edx*1]
// new edx is vm->pProgram->args[instr_idx]
31: 8b 3a mov edi,DWORD PTR [edx]
// arg0
33: 8b 52 04 mov edx,DWORD PTR [edx+0x4]
// arg1
36: 89 55 d4 mov DWORD PTR [ebp-0x2c],edx
// FAIL: spill vm->pProgram->args[instr_idx] to stack.
// why is this a fail? we can always get it from [esi+0xc] like at the beginning of the loop
39: 77 1d ja 58 <run_vm+0x58>

// aha, thats what the cmp eax, 0x19 was for previously.. refer to previous comment
3b: ff 24 85 00 00 00 00 jmp DWORD PTR [eax*4+0x0]

// jmp table badassery. but why did it take so long to get here?
// this is a JMP r/m32 (jump near, absolute indirect)
// the 0x0 gets set to a jump table offset by the linker later (i decompiled the .o file only)

// the jmp table itself will look like JMP address-back-into-run_vm-as-a-constant

This is basically the same code as before except that: there's an additional cmp/ja instruction pair to check that the instruction code is in the [0,25] range (and of course the jmp to the jmp table instead of the if/else pairs). This makes it always slower for a branch that will never get taken, and ruins the branch prediction of the first few iterations.

Also the indirect jmp does make it a bit harder to do instruction prefetching, but this should be truly straightforward since the value of 'eax' is known for a good 8 instructions from the beginning of the loop (and the prefetching is trivial for the direct jumps). Another consideration is the L1 i-cache, which is 32K on a Nehalem. A quick google search for the micro-ops cache reveals it to be 12K. Since the loop is fairly tiny, both of these easily fit into those caches with probably at least 1 order of magnitude left over.

Supposing that the redundant cmp/ja is removed, we are now on a more even field. It should be faster for pretty much anything except the first case (instruction is a MOV).

jmp [indirect abs]
jmp direct abs

vs

cmp eax, 0x0 // is EAX a mov?
jg somewhere_else // skip the following section if its not a MOV

The second code will always be faster if we're always hitting MOVs, don't ask me to prove this, but it's a gut feeling that there's less micro ops involved in the second case. The equal point will probably be when the instrucitons are always PUSH (1) or POP (2). But after that it will always be faster. So I think overall unless all the instructions are MOV,PUSH,POP (haha unlikely) the jmp table solution should be faster with cmp/ja removed.

That being said, I think I've spent too much time on this as-is and will not be trying to remove the cmp/ja.

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Summary:
GCC doesn't generate the best code, and there's some things that are hard for even the compiler to optimize. Sometimes you have to massage the compiler into doing what you want, and it doesn't mean the theoretical approach to using switches over chained if/elses is flawed.

It's my gut feeling that if we can get the optimizer in this case to work slightly better, the switch statement should always be faster than the if/elses.

It also would've been interested to see the x86_64 disassembly, but of course then we have the downside of using 64-bit everywhere which leads to larger instruction encodings and the upside of less register spills.