Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[pgerassi]

Dear Chipguy:

EPIC is just warmed over VLIW. All of the changes were to get more performance from the hardware when both it and the compilers weren't able to deliver on the real world performance promises. EPIC has the same disadvantages that most VLIWs have when applied to the general purpose computing world. Their best advantages come in predictable narrowly targetted applications. There they can do quite well.

EPIC has failed in its orignal targets like all of the other VLIWs. On the same transistor budgets, the non eplicitly parallel instruction CPUs (RISC and CISC) seem to blow it away.

Pete