Zend published this infographic and it got me thinking about CPU instructions. According to the graphic, the Wordpress homepage required 9.4 billion machine instructions to render, but they've optimized PHP7 and it's now down to 2.6 billion. To count CPU Instructions on a Linux box you can use the perf command:

perf stat -e instructions <my_command>

In comparison, some very simple Linux commands take a significant amount of instructions:

# Approximately 640,000 instructions
perf stat -e instructions echo '' 

# Approximately 2 million instructions
perf stat -e instructions cd ~

# Approximately 700,000 instructions
perf stat -e instructions clear