The comparison to star wars is certainly apt. It doesn't need to work, in the engineering sense, to be useful. Sometimes economics can trump engineering. An im

The comparison to star wars is certainly apt. It doesn't need to work, in the engineering sense, to be useful. Sometimes economics can trump engineering. An important part of the PR machinery was that by picking up a hot topic from academia, they really got absolutely everyone to talk about VLIW as the next genreration RISC. And everyone already knew that RISC was superior and x86 was a toy, but which also was mostly true at time. In the end, what won was huge caches and huge OoO pipelines. Linus Torvalds had some strong opinions and well known opinions on this, which turned out to be mostly right.