Not sure why you were downvoted. What you say is true. You could count the cycles of the instructions to figure out exactly how long a loop would take at a give

Not sure why you were downvoted. What you say is true. You could count the cycles of the instructions to figure out exactly how long a loop would take at a given clock frequency. The entities manipulated by the program literally existed. If the ISA said there are 8 registers, you could find 8 areas of the silicon die corresponding to those. The ISA features on a modern processor are a fiction. Especially if it something riddled with 50 years of backwards compatibility, like Intel.