Computation is only a small part of computing, addressed by languages such as OpenCL and by no means simple, observe constant GameReady driver releases from Nvi

Computation is only a small part of computing, addressed by languages such as OpenCL and by no means simple, observe constant GameReady driver releases from Nvidia to support each new major game. C is still pretty good at many other parts of low level computing, such as managing state of hardware or allocation of system memory to different tasks. Such tasks are not well suited to parallelism, as they must maintain a globally consistent state. It is perhaps true that CPUs and compilers should execute C code mostly as it is, with only local optimizations to spare programmer of having to decide whether x + x, or x * 2 or x << 1 is faster for example. This would improve system security and reliability while freeing up time to work on great compute languages for vectorizable computations. But, at the end of the day, CPU makers and compiler writers are humans motivated by both career success and less tangible bragging rights. So OF COURSE they will chase benchmarks at the expense of everything else, even when benchmarks have little to do with real life performance in an average case. I have a 13 year old 17 inch MacBook pro I use for some favorite old games. When I fire it up, I don't see any differences in my computing experience vs a 2023 laptop. So whatever advances in CPU/compiler design were made since do not seem to help with tasks I am actually interested in.