It crossed my mind is that this only is valid as long as you can reasonable expect most of the uses themselves to have enough ILP, not just the hardware sched

It crossed my mind is that this only is valid as long as you can reasonable expect most of the uses themselves to have enough ILP, not just the hardware scheduler. I'm thinking back to some linear algebra code I wrote which was bounded by min(loads-per-cycle, FMA per cycle). Adding more fma units there wouldn't help if you didn't increase load units equivalently, so for this sort of software wider vector units are better.