Microcode. Back when C became a thing, microcode only existed on 'big iron'. That changed 20+ years ago. The microarchitecture is the 'real' architecture you

Microcode. Back when C became a thing, microcode only existed on 'big iron'. That changed 20+ years ago. The microarchitecture is the 'real' architecture you're running on, the ISA that assembly language and C code is written against is a facade. It has value in that we don't need to rewrite everything every few years when the microarchitecture changes, but the downside is what we consider low level programming languages talking 'directly' to the hardware are now going through another layer of abstraction.