If by "close to the machine" you mean "close to the PDP-11", then sure, but the machine you're likely to write for hasn't been at all like a PDP-11 for quite some time: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
Maybe he would like to have a modern C that is actually close to the machine which exposes L1-3 caches go the programmer which he has to manage himself.
That would be pretty cool though.
Since even ARM has L2/L3 caches, it wouldn't sacrifice the portability that C was built for either.
How would you expose caches in a programming language exactly?
We can already do a lot of this in C with pragmas, no reason it couldn't be a macro-esque system.