Thank you for an interesting comment - seems to imply that Intel have markedly improved the Itanium compiler since they discontinued Itanium which is interestin

Thank you for an interesting comment - seems to imply that Intel have markedly improved the Itanium compiler since they discontinued Itanium which is interesting! I guess any new architecture needs to be substantially better than existing out of order, superscalar implementations to justify any change and we are still seeing more transistors being thrown at existing architectures each year and generating some performance gains. I wonder if / when this stops then we will see a revisiting of the VLIW approach.