Issue #1 is a big deal, but they've never said otherwise. Issue #2 is less of a reason to worry. The 33 instructions is an upper limit, and will likely be a lo

Issue #1 is a big deal, but they've never said otherwise. Issue #2 is less of a reason to worry. The 33 instructions is an upper limit, and will likely be a lot lower on most implementations. They also don't expect, nor need, it to be saturated. Further, their instruction set is much more amiable to parallelism than normal instruction sets because * Their instructions have special values (NaN and NaR) that enable extra parallelism. * Their instructions avoid side effects that prevent parallelism. This includes not just condition codes, but effectively the whole belt mechanism. * Their instructions can move data across themselves horizontally (under certain phase boundaries), so certain data dependencies are allowed inside an instruction. In essence, you're running at three-to-five times the clock rate but each clock is only allowed to run a given subset of instructions. There's an example they give where the whole of a vectorized strcpy iteration is done in one instruction, with no set-up or tear-down needed. This is of course a best-case scenario, in that every technique they have is in use simultaneously, but all of the techniques they give are generally applicable and (relatively speaking) simple for compilers to use.