Xilinx Versal AI cores suggest that VLIW + SIMD is a winner. Speaking of which: so was AMD Terrascale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeraScale_(microarchitectu

Xilinx Versal AI cores suggest that VLIW + SIMD is a winner. Speaking of which: so was AMD Terrascale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeraScale_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeraScale_(microarchitecture) ----------- It just needs to be in the right situation. GPUs almost entirely compute inside of register space, while FPGAs have carefully laid out memory exactly perfectly for their compute, so once again VLIW can fly. SIMD is an important technique to scale vs GPUs, because... well... SIMD is basically free scaling so might as well get it. So that's the combo IMO. Remove the random memory delays associated with general purpose compute, have a crap-ton of register space to never touch memory under normal circumstances, have huge kernels for DSP / GPU like tasks, and let the machine fly. ---------- I think it so happens that SIMD-parallelism was easier than expected, while VLIW-parallelism is harder than expected. So SIMD takes priority, but both should happen in these use cases. If you consider that the 2000s period of AMD64 vs IA-64 going on, the AMD systems focused on SSE / SIMD parallelism to provide us with the high-performance multimedia DivX decoders and whatnot (and other multimedia problems that consumers needed SIMD compute for back in the day). That parallelism was enough to be competitive vs IA-64. "General purpose CPUs" are so RAM-latency limited in practice. So out-of-order machines that can find work while waiting for RAM (again: AMD64) get a benefit.