[rob74]

Articles like this remind me of that one time I wrote a 6502 simulator in Turbo Pascal (complete with a primitive text mode disassembler where you could view and edit the machine code stored in memory) as a semester break project. It's of course very far from the complexity of today's CPUs, but basically they still work the same, and all of the optimizations of modern CPUs (pipelining, various cache levels, parallel execution, prefetch, branch prediction etc. etc. etc.) should be transparent to the user - of course, if you want to eke out the last bit of performance (targeting a specific CPU), it helps to be aware of all of that, but you don't need it for understanding how a CPU works.