[illys]

Your question seems provocative... but that's a very good question. I've always liked assembly programming and I got very puzzled when I discovered the processor metal have gone very far from the x86 instruction set I was writing. Il felt like the magic was gone.

Indeed there is no direct match anymore between instructions and gate combinations on the processor die. There is a microcode translating x86 instruction into whatever electronics are below. Change this microcode, and you could have your processor speak a different binary code (matched to a assembler language).