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> VLIW seems like a dead end. VLIW has been amazingly successful in DSP. All the world's baseband processors use VLIW machines. Many of the accelerated video
by brandmeyer 7y ago
> VLIW seems like a dead end.
VLIW has been amazingly successful in DSP. All the world's baseband processors use VLIW machines. Many of the accelerated video decoders are also VLIW machines under the covers.
- dragontamer 7y agoWhile I recognize that DSPs are power-efficiency champs, I'm not aware of any DSP (or VLIW architecture) being used in top supercomputing lists, like TOP500 or GREEN500. Its all CPU-based, GPU-based, or that weird "PEZY" from Japan (which is just... weird). Who knows what the future holds... but SIMD is currently making a big change to the supercomputing landscape (both in CPU-design with AVX512 and GPU-design with NVidia).
- brandmeyer 7y agoI'm pretty sure that's because they are hard to program for. Although automatic compilers and instruction schedulers for VLIW machines exist, they aren't nearly as good as hand-tuning. VLIW machines have a niche where a fairly small amount of code is both very arithmetic-intensive, predictable, and executed in a power-sensitive environment. In HPC and most business workloads, you just can't dedicate the labor required to making your code work well on them.