Anyway, I do not see how this affects the design of C in a way that makes no sense anymore today (except that one could require CHAR_BIT to be eight, but there are still DSPs where this is not the case). I think people repeat the "the C design reflects the out-dated PDP-11 hardware" meme because it sounds smart while in reality it is just nonsense.

So when is WG14 standardising modern hardware into the C standard?

Basic stuff like SIMD, SIMT, without requiring users to go beyond language extensions, something that any programming language can offer in similar capacity?