This is pretty much my issue with this article. By its criteria assembly isn’t low level, which makes the claim pretty uninteresting. You could argue there are/

This is pretty much my issue with this article. By its criteria assembly isn’t low level, which makes the claim pretty uninteresting. You could argue there are/were processors that had low level ISAs (VLIW, no OoO exec, no memory reordering, no caches, no branch prediction, etc.) but they are all niche (usually low power embedded DSPs) or failed to capture the market (Itanium) because they failed to deliver performance comparable to the highly abstracted CPU supposedly “designed” to run C (also a questionable claim, I think the reality is it has more to do with sequential execution being the way humans think, a point Jim Keller has made in several interviews).