The GPU model is a proven way to get better performance out of traditional CPUs also. You will get the best performance from modern CPUs if you treat each SIMD lane as a parallel execution on homogeneous data and also execute on multiple cores. See ispc, and Burst Compiler as examples.

I think there is a view that this style of programming only applies to traditionally high compute areas like games, hpc, rendering, ML, etc but we've recently seen a lot of core building blocks of "normal" web applications like hash tables (https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/f14/) and json parsers (https://github.com/lemire/simdjson) get massive perform gains from SIMD.