[cmrdporcupine]

Actually once you have these tools at your disposal and see them, it's actually hard to not see them and find places to use them. String processing, bitset indices in data structures, etc. all have places where they naturally fit.

I have a data structure library (in Rust) where I would love to have these. The problem is that AVX-512 just isn't common enough to rely on it yet, and I don't even have it on my workstation CPU (Radeon 6850, from just last year).

But in particular whether they had something in mind, I suspect Intel was thinking about video codecs and containers for a lot of these. If you read through the specs for them, you will find all sorts of places which call for things like this.

But yes, whether compiler developers can make good use of these. Questionable. They are really for specialized optimization workflows.