[nsguy]

IIRC reading some Intel CPU design history some of their designers are from a CS/software background. But I agree. Software is naturally very sequential which is different than digital hardware which is naturally/inherently parallel. A clock can change the state of a million flip-flops all at once, it's a very different way of thinking about computation (though ofcourse at the theoretical level all the same) and then there's the physics and EE parts of a real world CPU. Writing software and designing CPUs are just very different disciplines and the CPU as it appears to the software developer isn't how it appears to the CPU designer.

[banish-m4]

I'm not talking about Intel's engineers, I'm saying very few software engineers today understand how a processor works. I'm sure Intel hires all sorts of engineers for different aspects of each ecosystem they maintain. Furthermore, very few software engineers have ever even touched a physical server because they're sequestered away from a significant fraction of the total stack.

Speculative and out-of-order execution requires synchronization to maintain dataflow and temporal consistency.

Computer Organization is a good book should anyone want to dive deeper.