"Processor architecture??? Is that really to be taken seriously?" Sure. You can get big speed-ups by exploiting the storage hierarchy, and by writing less-bran

"Processor architecture??? Is that really to be taken seriously?" Sure. You can get big speed-ups by exploiting the storage hierarchy, and by writing less-branchy code that does not bamboozle the branch predictor. These can be studied from the top-level functional perspective. The low-level details can be ignored.