Well, yes and no. The 386 is chugging through the stream of instructions sequentially, unlike modern processors. There are various clever optimizations, though.

Well, yes and no. The 386 is chugging through the stream of instructions sequentially, unlike modern processors. There are various clever optimizations, though. First, there is some pipelining, so the microcode for the next instruction can execute while the previous one is finishing. Second, the CPU has 16 bytes of prefetching, so instructions are fetched from memory asynchronously from their execution. So you know what instructions are executed and in what order, but the timing is fairly unpredictable. I should mention that microcode in the 386 is pretty different from micro-ops that modern processors run. They both break machine instructions down into smaller steps. But microcode runs sequentially, while micro-ops are sort of tossed into the CPU and run independently through a dataflow engine, with everything sorted out at the end to look sequential. Confusingly, modern processors use "microcode" to hold the micro-ops for complicated instructions that can't be handled by the regular instruction decoder; this is sort of like old-style microcode, but not exactly.