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by horsawlarway 3207 days ago
It's not that simple though. Most modern CPUs that support the x86_64 instruction set don't actually run them as instructions on the hardware. They do all sorts of magic to queue operations, increase pipeline throughput, manage register access, make branch predictions, etc...

You can think of assembly on those cpus as a high level language. It has little correlation with what's actually happening in hardware.

This is EXACTLY the same type of "magic" that is getting complained about above. The real implementation details are hidden and unknown, but the abstraction is useful.

1 comments

Ah interesting. Not familiar with x_64 really. Mostly 16 & 32 bit experience here.