> 2. What type of applications would benefit consumers and general computing at scale?

I'm not a expert, but this will make "SIMD" nearly everything.

In special, will allow data to be encoded as vectors and processed in batches ie: make it more than is now, and as emergent realization of the data, not as an "extra" to be added, sometimes, like actual SIMD instructions today.

This already is a thing in some rdbms/pipeline, where combine per-"row" and columnar processing is optimal.