This is why the old-fashioned university course on assembly language is still useful. Writing assembly language (preferably for a less-complex architecture, so the student doesn't get bogged down on minutiae) gives one a gut feeling for how machines work. Running the program on a simulator that optionally pays attention to pipeline and cache misses can help a person understand these issues.
It doesn't matter what architecture one studies, or even a hypothetical one. The last significant application I wrote in assembler was for System/370, some 40 years ago. Yet CPU ISAs of today are not really that different, conceptually.
It doesn't matter what architecture one studies, or even a hypothetical one. The last significant application I wrote in assembler was for System/370, some 40 years ago. Yet CPU ISAs of today are not really that different, conceptually.