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The article does make an example quite early;

> GPUs achieve very high performance without any of this logic, at the expense of requiring explicitly parallel programs.

GPU cores are in some ways closer to "PDP-11", they're either acting as thousands of parallel simple processors, or expose pretty raw instructions for very parallel use-cases.

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That seems fair, CUDA kernels and shader code do feel like they're at a similar level of abstraction over the hardware as C was to the PDP-11. But I do think there isn't really an equivalent for modern CPU ISAs

Mabie hand-rolling LLVM IR representations would count.

Doesn't assembly allow devs to ignore speculative execution as well?

You can place LFENCE(x86)/CSDB(arm) around code blocks, but you can do that in C too.

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