Very Long Instruction Word


Very Long Instruction Word

(VLIW) Used to describe an assembly language instruction set implemented using horizontal microcode. A horizontallyencoded instruction word which encodes four or more operationsmight be considered "very long".

VLIW architectures are sometimes classified as a type ofstatic superscalar architecture. They are static in thesense that which units operate in parallel is determined bythe instruction rather than by dynamic scheduling at run time.

Producing code for VLIW machines is difficult; trace scheduling is a helpful compiler technique.

The most famous VLIW machine was built by (the late)Multiflow Computer, Inc.