What leads you to think the list of applications I enumerated is 'niche'? > in order to implement properly efficient SIMD algorithms you need experts that are

What leads you to think the list of applications I enumerated is 'niche'? > in order to implement properly efficient SIMD algorithms you need experts that are rare Some truth to this, but many algorithms can be implemented once and then reused, like a standard library. > many algorithms that work great with SIMD work even better as compute shader on your run of the mill cheap iGPU Also agree to some extent, except that you'd have more concerns about availability, vendor lock-in, and performance portability. > best example how irrelevant SIMD really is: How many Terabytes of UTF8 are you converting to UTF16 per day? probably zero. First, how does one example of a SIMD-enabled algorithm show that SIMD itself is irrelevant? Second, have you considered that some databases store UTF-16 and want to convert it for interoperability (or vice versa)? IBM apparently has dedicated instructions for this. Would they have been added if there was no demand?