"Intuitively" here should be taken to mean approximately the same as "naively" – as in, the intuition that most of us learn at first that CPUs work ("as if") by

"Intuitively" here should be taken to mean approximately the same as "naively" – as in, the intuition that most of us learn at first that CPUs work ("as if") by executing one instruction at a time, strictly mechanistically, exactly corresponding to the assembly code. The way a toy architecture on a first-year intro to microprocessors course – or indeed a 6502 or 8086 or 68000 – would do it. Which is to say, no pipelining, no superscalar, no prefetching, no out-of-order execution, no branch prediction, no speculative execution, and so on.