I don&#x27;t know if 1000x is something that can be backed up, but the difference between a program written with poor memory locality and one written with great locality plus 256 bit SIMD can give a performance boost of around 100x.<p>This isn&#x27;t theoretical, I&#x27;ve done it personally and this is just one core.<p>So the claims are anything but outrageous although that is basically what GPUs are - transistors going to actual FLOPS instead of dealing with memory latency.<p>Intel cores however are structured like this because most code isn&#x27;t written with cache locality in mind, they are written in god awful pointer chasing spaghetti styles so all the work that Intel puts in to make that go fast pays off.<p>Skylake almost had SIMD scatter and gather, which could have been an enormous boost to properly written software, but they had no reason to put it in when they are curb stomping AMD on one hand, and very little software takes advantage of the SIMD units they have now on the other.