The Vector extension has been ratified since 2021 it’s a standard part of the spec just don’t expect a random microcontroller to support it.
The SpacemiT K1 is 64GCVB and RVA22, doesn’t say which specific RVA22 there’s some without Vector support but it says in “GCVB” so w/e, also, “VLEN 256/128-bit x2 execution width”, if I’m parsing that correctly means you either get 256-bit vector registers or set the whole thing to 128 and then get (roughly) twice the ops/s.
And yes it’s much easier to emit vector code than to deal with the nightmare that’s SIMD. It’s as if Intel would’ve been sensible ages ago and not introduced SIMD but expanded on repnz stosb to make it useful for things other than memcpy. And no Intel has no excuse: Crays existed when they decided on SIMD.