[cheatercheater]

This is not "extra stuff". It is how it works. x86 was made to be simple to hand-code, not to in any way reflect the hardware. And then, decades later, new developments to it are so that it's easy to compile to. The language went through two major paradigms without either having the point of x86 reflecting the hardware it abstracts. SIMD, NUMA, pipelining and caching is exactly how processors work right now. And they're radically different to what happened before the Intel Core family of processors. This is in turn radically different to what happened before the Pentium Pro family of processors. Yet all support the same x86 instruction set. The corollary is that x86 is an abstraction. You're being ignorant if you think x86 is like the opcodes being executed after the whole caching stage has happened.