[therealcamino]

The problem is, compile-time instruction scheduling for VLIW vs an out-of-order, superscalar processor is inherently unequal because there is an information gap. At compile time you cannot see the actual dependences, and have to statically schedule for the worst case. You can do great on regular, array-based code. But VLIW can never beat OOO superscalar processors on irregular or pointer-chasing code, because there is unequal information. On those codes, the information gap can't ever be overcome, no matter what compiler technology you have. If you don't have access to the at-runtime data values (and you never will have that), there is no static schedule that can compete.

[sifar]

Both VLIW & Ooo Superscalar are doing a different tradeoff to achieve similar goal - maximize ILP.

With VLIW the compiler unrolls the code and tries to find the parallelization but has no control over runtime stalls and results in larger code size. The complexity is in the compiler while the machine is simpler.

With an OOO superscalar machine, you have to dedicate significant piece of HW for stuff that would be easily done by the compiler. The advantage is you can get reduced code size and better performance for non-linear code.