Data-level parallel processing (or SIMD vector width) is a different thing to address space width. If you want to see some _really_ wide units, look at GPUs. F

Data-level parallel processing (or SIMD vector width) is a different thing to address space width. If you want to see some _really_ wide units, look at GPUs. For UUIDs, 16-byte short strings and IPv6, there's no real reason the SIMD units couldn't do the work there. (Granted the existing vector units may be a bit short on features for working "across" lanes - I'm not sure how capable they are at dealing with null-terminated C strings for example). In principle at least (and allowing for some snags around memory alignment), C++ std::strings with the short string optimisation (which stores the string's data on the local stack, if it's less than a certain number of bytes) can already be loaded into vector registers and indeed never materialised as memory at all. How much this happens in pratise I wouldn't like to say, but it's not that hard to roll your own stringid_16 or whatever with conversion operators.