Suppose you have a value in an XMM register and you want to limit the bottom byte to a particular value and set all the other bytes to zero. (Yes, I needed to do this.)

One way to do this is to apply the two steps in sequence:

; value to truncate/limit is in xmm0

; First, zero out the top 15 bytes
    pslldq  xmm0, 15
    psrldq  xmm0, 15

; Now limit the bottom byte to N
    mov     al, N
    movd    xmm1, eax
    pminub  xmm0, xmm1

But you can do it all in one step by realizing that min(x, 0) = 0 for all unsigned values x.

; value to truncate/limit is in xmm0
    mov     eax, N
    movd    xmm1, eax
    pminub  xmm0, xmm1

In pictures:

In intrinsics:

__m128i min_low_byte_and_set_upper_bytes_to_zero(__m128i x, uint8_t N)
{
 return _mm_min_epi8(x, _mm_cvtsi32_si128(N));
}