It's a consequence of keeping our general purpose single threaded programming model the same for five decades. It has it's merits, but the underlying hardware

It's a consequence of keeping our general purpose single threaded programming model the same for five decades. It has it's merits, but the underlying hardware has changed. Intel tried to push this responsibility to the compiler with Itanium but that failed catastrophicically, so we're back to the CPU pretending it's 1985.