Shaders are for different hardware than regular code, both in the amount of independent work happening all the time but also the memory hierarchy is designed fo

Shaders are for different hardware than regular code, both in the amount of independent work happening all the time but also the memory hierarchy is designed for very different workloads. I think it's the memory than explains why one has been more successful. A more practical reason in terms of ergonomics is probably that by the time you have a problem that fits a different programming model but still compiles to SIMD you're basically in GPU territory already.