[snvzz]

>Microsoft has been working on a VLIW too (yes I know, not exactly VLIW, it's close enough).

VLIW isn't going anywhere. Generating code for VLIW isn't getting any easier anytime soon, and the complexity doesn't help the formal proofing that's become a must thanks to data protection requirements of the current world.

If we've learned anything in the past decades, it'd be that RISC is the only valid approach going forward.

[zaarn]

There is a lot of research in VLIW even in the modern days and there is a lot of VLIW hardware out there (DSPs, Russian Hardware, Microcontrollers, etc.)

RISC is not the one-true-way and I don't think there is evidence for that. x86 is at this point an overburdened platform so any alternative that is fresh, so to speak, is viable.

RISC is maybe the way forward in the short term as it is more similar to CISC.

[jabl]

For general purpose code (that is, not DSP's and the like), Intel, HP, and whoever else they managed to suck into their vortex of doom, made a zillion $$$ bet on VLIW, and ultimately it all belly-flopped. Not just some academic paper, but working high end silicon on a leading edge process, big investments in compilers, and whatnot.

Why would it be different the next time?

[zaarn]

Because experience from past mistakes.

Mill are doing some insane IPC improvements and also hammer out a lot of the security misfortunes that x86 has (such as the ability to perform a stack overflow into a return address or the ring security levels 0 and 3 that are so popular).

The EPIC Cpu that Microsoft worked on had Windows 10 and Linux running in the end. Including LLVM, C/C++ runtime, Busybox, FreeRTOS, .NET and core parts of Visual C++ 2017.

One of the core reasons that Itanium sucked ass was IMO that the architecture was too different and compilers as well as programming languages weren't taking advantage of it well enough to make the difference.

The network effect of "run existing blobs" is strong enough that I consider any change from ARM's RISC on the mobile space in the next 10 years unlikely. On the desktop the situation is similar but IIRC MS has been tinkering on a fairly good x86 JIT emulator for Windows which was able to run MS Office fairly decently, that might remove such network effects.