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Most applications of vliw are in dsp, gpu, video codec coprocessor type things. It's mature technology and successful outside general purpose CPUs. Transmeta w

Most applications of vliw are in dsp, gpu, video codec coprocessor type things. It's mature technology and successful outside general purpose CPUs. Transmeta was 25 years ago and trying to apply vliw in a novel way to run x86 code, a daring idea that didn't pay off very well.

CalChris 6y ago
It paid off just fine except in a monetary sense. They got to market with a low power fast x86 clone, arguably creating that low power market. However, for that thankless and difficult task of creating an X86 clone (x87 was a nightmare) they received the great prize of competing against Intel in both manufacturing and marketing. Moreover, they were a 32b machine in 2000 and 64b was right around the corner. Indeed when AMD64 came along, announced in 2000, it was simpler and forced Intel+HP to give up on Itanium. (Yes, Itanium had other problems but engineering problems can, to a degree, be surmounted. Market problems are harder.)
- fulafel 6y ago
  It's always possible that they had just bad luck / timing, but why didn't anyone try/succeed with it since?
  - CalChris 6y ago
    Well a bunch of the Crusoe people did. They eventually got acquired by Nvidia and that’s what Denver is. Not VLIW though.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      I was pretty sure that both the Transmeta cores, as well as the Denver cores were VLIW internally.
    - fulafel 6y ago
      Yep, The OOO nature of the cpu might make the static scheduling less attractive for Denver. But I think the public info doesn't say either way vliw or not. Also it's now mainstream (Intel does it) to have an intermediate code storage format with the introduction of trace caches. I wonder what the usual format of those is.
brandmeyer 6y ago
This is understating the situation, IMO. VLIW is wildly successful in DSP. Pretty much all of the world's baseband processors are VLIW machines, for example. Current generation hexagon processors managed to combine VLIW with SMT to hide some memory latency as well.

CalChris 6y ago

It paid off just fine except in a monetary sense. They got to market with a low power fast x86 clone, arguably creating that low power market. However, for that thankless and difficult task of creating an X86 clone (x87 was a nightmare) they received the great prize of competing against Intel in both manufacturing and marketing. Moreover, they were a 32b machine in 2000 and 64b was right around the corner. Indeed when AMD64 came along, announced in 2000, it was simpler and forced Intel+HP to give up on Itanium. (Yes, Itanium had other problems but engineering problems can, to a degree, be surmounted. Market problems are harder.)

fulafel 6y ago
It's always possible that they had just bad luck / timing, but why didn't anyone try/succeed with it since?
- CalChris 6y ago
  Well a bunch of the Crusoe people did. They eventually got acquired by Nvidia and that’s what Denver is. Not VLIW though.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    I was pretty sure that both the Transmeta cores, as well as the Denver cores were VLIW internally.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Yep, The OOO nature of the cpu might make the static scheduling less attractive for Denver. But I think the public info doesn't say either way vliw or not. Also it's now mainstream (Intel does it) to have an intermediate code storage format with the introduction of trace caches. I wonder what the usual format of those is.

brandmeyer 6y ago

This is understating the situation, IMO. VLIW is wildly successful in DSP. Pretty much all of the world's baseband processors are VLIW machines, for example. Current generation hexagon processors managed to combine VLIW with SMT to hide some memory latency as well.