> I'm not sure I quite buy that. In practice, what would happen is that a suitably large, optimized VLIW core would start fetching more than one wide instructio

> I'm not sure I quite buy that. In practice, what would happen is that a suitably large, optimized VLIW core would start fetching more than one wide instruction in a cycle and issuing the resulting ops in parallel with interlocks for dependencies, etc... Effectively, that is, VLIW would drop the explicit promise of the instruction set and turn into a speculative RISC core internally. Well at this point this would be quite insane to stay VLIW except for backward compat; but I suspect that the backward compat in question would have way more cost than e.g. the x86 tax. For example x86 is dense which is actually an advantage, but quite hard to decode (which is the main drawback of x86, but even then that's a quite relative drawback, because modern processes let us have complex decoders). What would VLIW have left for itself if internally turned into a classical modern speculative core? Maybe even load-time software translation would perform better...