When I was working on my PhD in WCET – Worst-Case Execution Time analysis – our goal was to utterly precisely predict the precise number of cycles that a processor would take to execute a certain piece of code. We and other groups designed analyses for caches, pipelines, even branch predictors, and ways to take into account information about program flow and variable values.
The complexity of modern processors – even a decade ago – was such that predictability was very difficult to achieve in practice. We used to joke that a complex enough processor would be like a random number generator.
Funnily enough, it turns out that someone has been using processors just like that. Guess that proves the point, in some way.