They work great in some situations, like playing back an MP3. If you're working with some problem where the memory accesses are either local or predictable eno

They work great in some situations, like playing back an MP3. If you're working with some problem where the memory accesses are either local or predictable enough that the prefetcher can guess right than a VLIW should be able to extract just as much parallelism as an OoO core and with less power. It's when you start suffering regular cache misses and the careful choreography of your VLIW instruction stream is thrown off that they start to lose. Which is most GUI programs, classical AI, web browsers and basically most things people do on desktops and servers so it's no surprise they lost there. But there are still lots of places in embedded computing where they're ubiquitous for good reason and your phone might very well have one in it too to offload some tasks to.