Ask HN: What is the future of vector instructions?

Writing performant numerical code for CPUs requires using vector instruction sets like AVX. With these instruction it is up to the compiler/programmer to vectorize the sequential program and deal with things like scatter/gather memory access or masks to deal with control divergence. On the other hand GPU's offer a cleaner multithreaded programming model with the mapping to vectorized form being done at runtime in hardware. And as the GPU's get more sophisticated controls, this mapping will become even more transparent performance-wise. Yet GPUs remain competitive with CPUs in terms of price and energy consumption.

Given this, can we expect CPU instruction sets to move away from explicit vectors and expose a GPU-like interface for parallel numerical work with the advantage that this GPU-like would be on the same chip and share the same cache with the more serial-oriented parts of the CPU?