Very Long Instruction Word Microprocessors
RISC and CISC type microprocessors are not the only game in town. VLIW microprocessors where once believed to be the future but not anymore. What happened?
In the early 2000s Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) microprocessors was all the hype to the point of causing several chip makers to simply drop developing their chip development process and sit back waiting for microprocessor Nirvana to arrive.
Transmeta with their Crusoe and Intel with their Itanium processors promised to bring about this VLIW revolution. Except if you look around, we are not in fact living in a a VLIW microprocessor Utopia.
So let us look at what these VLIW processors are like and try to explain why they failed.
Doing Work in Parallel
Because we cannot increase the clock frequency of microprocessor much anymore without overheating them, everything is really centered around way of doing as much work as possible in parallel.
We have developed a number of ways of doing this. The most straightforward approach is to have multiple microprocessor cores. Each core basically runs a separate program. This could be actual separate programs or programmers can split up…
