Comment by wolfgang42

The quest for performance has turned modern CPUs into something that looks a lot more like a JITed bytecode interpreter rather than the straightforward “this opcode activates this bit of the hardware” model they once were. Things like branch prediction, speculative execution, out-of-order execution, hyperthreading, register renaming, L1/2/3 caches, µOp caches, TLB caches... all mean that even looking at the raw machine code tells you relatively little about what parts of the hardware the code will activate or how it will perform in practice.