[donkeybeer]

By sub-assembly level I meant we must have some knowledge at least of pipelining, branch prediction, caching etc at least regardless of your language choice which is to say its not a completely clean abstraction you can totally ignore and forget about. Layers underneath that are probably not so important.

[trealira]

Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I agree that having an understanding of those things is necessary to write fast software.