Sometimes, writing Rails apps is awful. Do you know what's nearly always more awful? Handrolling assembly. Ruby lets us not think about how the processor works, but we're programmers. We're uniquely positioned to intellectually appreciate the wonderful, complex, engineering that goes into a processor. In this talk, you’ll learn a little more about what it means for Ruby to be an “interpreted” language, how a processor executes programs, and what magical tricks processor designers use to make our programs go faster with every generation. If you’ve ever written a Ruby program, and understand that a computer has a processor in it, this talk is probably for you.