Surely there is some improvement to be made by automatically parallelizing map and filter functions, and for side-effect free languages, automatically paralleli

Surely there is some improvement to be made by automatically parallelizing map and filter functions, and for side-effect free languages, automatically parallelizing functions that do not share state? Maybe this is more on the compiler side than the hardware side, but wouldn't this potentially provide a significant speedup if you have a lot of cores to take advantage of? A speedup that you can't get from procedural programming languages?