Yes! Not only is it a real thing, but with Moore’s Law slowing down, data/compute appetites going up, and the gap between processing speed and memory speed stil

Yes! Not only is it a real thing, but with Moore’s Law slowing down, data/compute appetites going up, and the gap between processing speed and memory speed still large and growing, the need for task specific compression is currently going up. Working on GPUs, I see many, and work on some task specific compression ideas as part of my job. The compiler has it’s own ways of compressing code & debug info. The hardware has it’s own ways of compressing textures. A recent feature we built on my team is a compressed encoding for adaptively subdividing curves. All of these things have the primary goal of reducing memory bandwidth, which in turn increases the speed of computation because memory is so frequently the main bottleneck.