I brought the article into it, as you seemed to deflect the misunderstanding of "low level" to what the article was pushing. And the article goes into several examples and has a "[this abstraction] is conspicuously absent on GPUs ..."

Granted, I can kind of see how the entire point of that rant from the article was that register renaming is some sort of sin of processor design. Problem is, of course, that you lose plenty of other speed tricks on GPU by making that tradeoff. More, my point was that that tradeoff comes from the natural unit of work for GPU, which would be operating over scenes of data. This isn't being opportunistic in looking for ways to go wide on operations, it is literally the reason those units were built. (And I'll ignore that CUDA programming looks a lot like a C program.)

Back to the idea of "closer to the metal," per the article. My further point was how close are we talking about? I know of literally no language that exposes all intrinsic operations of a machine to the end user. Excepting anything that allows inlined assembly? Such that anyone asking "what else is there" is almost certainly asking for those that do.

I'm ultimately open to the idea that there is no "close to the metal" language anymore. Largely for good reasons. To wit, it would be near impossible to code preemptively multitasked programs without something like register renaming. Yes, you could do it in software, but hard to see how that would dodge any of the complaints of the article with regards to the idea.

All of which to is to say that there not being an answer to the question that literally started this thread is a bit of the point? I'm sympathetic to the idea you were answering an easier question. I'm just pressing on the idea that you answered a different question.