I agree with almost everything you said, but I take issue with a couple of your examples. First, depending on the cipher suite, SSL can in fact get significant

I agree with almost everything you said, but I take issue with a couple of your examples. First, depending on the cipher suite, SSL can in fact get significant speedups from SIMD. Second, while compression is a pretty serial task, if you compress in blocks, then you can parallelize across those blocks; I know that's not SIMD, but it also doesn't require fancy processor cores to take advantage of the parallelism. A lot of server tasks are similar to that: parallel enough that they could benefit from having a bunch of somewhat wimpy but power-efficient cores thrown at them.