I feel bad that I really don't understand any of this. My mental model of what a CPU does stops at the assembly level, and intuitively feels like (and looks like) doing some convolution on an image - e.g. a local, nodal point moving through a bitmap, leaving behind the wake of some set of operations, a smear, with some of that smear propagating forward. But now I realize that all of these models are a middling-high level picture of a CPU's side effect, not it's operation - the manner in which it combines it's operands is, effectively, voodoo. But voodoo with which I am comfortable, for reasons involving NAND gates and Alan Turing, but I wonder: should I be so comfortable?