C gives the illusion of mapping to the hardware. Hardware manufacturers have moved heaven and earth to help maintain the illusion. It finally got too hard and they had to admit atomics and cores ro the model. The next watershed will be along soon enough, but the ability to present as a C machine has long been the gateway to success or failure of a new hardware architecture. Myriads of arguably superior machine designs have foundered on "but can I code for it in C?"