VLIW seems to be in that awkward space where (at least in the 00s), compilers weren't good enough to beat traditional code + traditional CPUs. But tweaking the

VLIW seems to be in that awkward space where (at least in the 00s), compilers weren't good enough to beat traditional code + traditional CPUs. But tweaking the assembly for VLIW / Itanium was still too hard. So SIMD (which is much harder to write than VLIW) wins because if the programmer drops down to the assembly level... "might as well" go for the harder SIMD-model that achieves slightly better performance over VLIW. I do wonder if today VLIW machines with modern compilers could be a thing. Compiler technology is so much better now, maybe we are in the era where VLIW could be renewed. But on the other hand, CUDA shows that SIMD-compilers / SIMD-languages have improved as well.