Comparisons with bit shifting

Question

I was attempting some basic programming in C using different integer types. The problem is to determine the number of ones in a given binary number. I used uint8_t as the type of the number and used a logical comparison with a left-shift operator. However, the comparisons don't work as expected:

My code is as follows:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
    uint8_t x=0xAA; //declare the number
    uint8_t cnt=0, y; // Initialize other variables
    while(x>0){
        y=x<<1;
        if(x > x<<1){
            cnt++;
        }
        x = x<<1;
        printf("%u %u \n", x, cnt);
    }
    printf("%u\n",cnt);
}

However, cnt is not updated at all: Output

However, if I typecast x<<1 to (uint8_t)(x<<1), or use y instead in the comparison, the code works. Could anyone explain this behavior? I am using the gcc compiler.

Thanks in advance