My take is both C and the hardware are targeting the same abstract machine. It seems too that attempts shift things one direction or another haven't been succes

My take is both C and the hardware are targeting the same abstract machine. It seems too that attempts shift things one direction or another haven't been successful. Itainium which tries to force the compiler to deal with instruction scheduling and parallelism, failed. Things like LISP machines also didn't do well. So thinking in terms of the abstract machine are valid for now. The exceptions mostly have to do with caching and understanding that processor can and does execute short sequences of instructions in parallel.