VLIWs can make use of the same branch predictors that you see in out of order cores like an Intel Core or in order cores like an ARM A53. The big problem that

VLIWs can make use of the same branch predictors that you see in out of order cores like an Intel Core or in order cores like an ARM A53. The big problem that VLIW faces is starting loads early so that they've finished by the time you need their contents. Itanium tried to do that but their mechanism really broke down in the face of possible memory exceptions and it didn't speed things up much. Mill has a cleverer way to speculate with loads which might work better but it's still entirely unable to speculatively load values across boundaries between codebases, like system calls. But of course speculatively loading across system calls is what's causing problems here. So it might be that the best thing is to accept the 80% performance solution in the same of security through keeping the hardware simple enough to understand.