We lost that control when CPUs became increasingly multilayered and complicated, with 20-step pipelines, enough parallelism to run a hundred instructions at the

We lost that control when CPUs became increasingly multilayered and complicated, with 20-step pipelines, enough parallelism to run a hundred instructions at the same time, with micro-ops and microcode, with branch predictors good enough to unroll some loops completely. What programmer today understands the branch prediction logic used on production system? Well enough to understand what difference branchlessness makes? And it doesn't seem to hurt. I at least have both worked on systems where I can read and write assembly and on one where I can't, and my "need to control" isn't such that the lack of assembly knowledge makes a significant impact on my effectiveness on the latter platform.