Do most of these application (machine learning, vision, etc) rely on OpenCL? It seems to me that GPUs are better suited to OpenCL than a regular CPU, but if that's what all the excitement is about I suggest reading up on some of the work on adding vector extensions to RISC-V and the corresponding flops/watt they're may achieve. They are basing some of the work on results from here: http://hwacha.org although they make it clear that hwacha will not be the standard vector instruction set.