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Adapting to advancing hardware isn't impossible. It's been awhile since I've looked so details are a little hazy, but I know the Mill architecture had an answer

Adapting to advancing hardware isn't impossible. It's been awhile since I've looked so details are a little hazy, but I know the Mill architecture had an answer to this. I believe they were using effectively two-pass compilation. The first compiled against an abstract version of the architecture, and this is what was distributed. Then this could be further specialized on the user's machine as at that point the limits of the hardware would be known. I don't recall if they had an idea for SMT as well or not. It's possible they wrote it off entirely, particularly after Spectre and all that.

djcapelis 6y ago
You are correct that with a lot of effort you can get a compiler to emit VLIW instructions that can claw back some of these problems and have some, but not all, of the information you have available to the processor core at runtime which can make things slightly smarter. And with all of that effort which involves changing software distribution models, jettisoning energy efficient flexible heterogenous architectures, and abandoning SMT, you might be able to get something close to performing as well as… what we already have today without VLIW. Not sure why anyone thinks that’s an argument for doing it.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > Not sure why anyone thinks that’s an argument for doing it. Because it didn't take very much effort and it doesn't require changing distribution models or abandoning those things.