AFAIK Intel and HP spent well north of $1B on VLIW compiler research, with crickets to show for it all.
The people prophesying the second coming of VLIW (for general purpose code) seriously need to explain the compiler breakthroughs that have been done to make the whole affair worthwhile.
Yes -- and explain how code statically scheduled for the worst-case dependences at compile time can ever beat out-of-order and speculative execution that can see the actual dependences at runtime. For anything other than extremely regular codes, there's an information gap that can't be overcome.
The people prophesying the second coming of VLIW (for general purpose code) seriously need to explain the compiler breakthroughs that have been done to make the whole affair worthwhile.