In practice EPIC = IA-64 and Itanium is the only implementation, but IA-64 is probably the easier thing to search for. The only book I have is “IA-64 and Eleme

In practice EPIC = IA-64 and Itanium is the only implementation, but IA-64 is probably the easier thing to search for. The only book I have is “IA-64 and Elementary Functions: Speed and Precision”. EPIC’s problem is shared with VLIW of which EPIC can be understood as a refinement. VLIW excels in a deterministic world where the compiler can predict latencies and produce a good schedule, but falls apart in face of loads with highly variable latencies (an in-order implementation has no option but to stall when load data doesn’t arrive on time). EPIC patches this a bit by allowing software prefetching and SW exposed speculation, but it comes at a significant code bloat and it can cover only a small fraction of what dynamic scheduling can cover. At Transmeta, our VLIW engine did this too (with some obvious advantages over IA-64) and we suffered from similar problems.