[dragontamer]

I'm not aware of anything that improves thread-divergence. NVidia's most recent GPUs have superscalar operations, which is a trick from CPU-land (multiple pipelines operating 2 or more instructions per clock tick). NVidia has an integer-pipeline and a floating-point pipeline, and both can operate simultaneously (ex: for(int i=0; i<100; i++) x *=blah; the "i++" is integer, while the "x *= blah" is floating point, so both operate simultaneously.

CPUs have extremely flexible pipelines: Intel's pipeline 0 and 1 basically can do anything, pipeline 5 can do most stuff but is missing division IIRC (and a few other things). Load/store are done on some other pipelines, etc. etc.

Apple's and AMD's CPU pipelines are more symmetrical and uniform.

NVidia GPUs are the only superscalar ones I can think of, aside from AMD GPU's scalar vs vector split (which isn't really the "superscalar" operation I'm trying to describe).

[TomVDB]

Starting with Volta, Nvidia GPUs have forward progress guarantee, preventing lockups when there’s thread divergence.

That doesn’t improve the performance of a well behaved and well written compute shader. But avoiding hard hangs IMO deserves the label “improved thread divergence.”