[inkyoto]

Out of three VLIW architectures I have looked into, 2x (Elbrus and Itanium) rely on the predication heavily. i860 does not have instruction predicates.

Predication places the burden of creating optimal instruction bundles AND the correct hinting via the use of predicates on the compiler. If stars aligned, the code could perform blazingly fast. It turned out that aligning the stars in an optimal space time sequence was an arduous task due to the actual hints only being available at the runtime.

Which is where JIT has delivered well (and cheaper!) without requiring a radically different VLIW design.