Yes, of course the modern CPUs are designed with C in mind, and C-based benchmarks are always the first to be used to assess any new architectural change. So ca

Yes, of course the modern CPUs are designed with C in mind, and C-based benchmarks are always the first to be used to assess any new architectural change. So calling them 'C machines' is legitimate. The worst bit of being a 'C machine' is the fact that the integers of unspecified nature and pointers are interchangeable, instead of forcing them to occupy the different register files. Another similar consequence is the lack of type tags, which could have been useful for many high level language features - GC, smarter caches pre-fetching the pointers from structures (most importantly for Lisp - pre-fetching the cons cells, depending on a way they've been accessed).