> Without AMD64, I firmly believe eventually Itanium would have been the new world no matter what.
VLIW is not binary forward- or cross-implementation-compatible. If MODEL1 has 2 instruction per block and its successor MODEL2 has 4, the code for MODEL1 will be run on MODEL2, but it will underperform due to underutilization. If execution latencies differ between two versions of the same VLIW ISA implementation, the code for one may not be executed optimally on another. Even different memory controllers and cache hierarchies can change optimal VLIW code.
This precludes any VLIW from having multiple differently constrained implementations. You cannot segment VLIW implementations you can do with as x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, etc, where same code will be executed as optimal as possible on the concrete implementation of ISA.
So - no, Itanium (or any other VLIW for that matter) would not be the new world.
> VLIW is not binary forward- or cross-implementation-compatible.
It was on IA-64, the bundle format was deliberately chosen to allow for easy extension.
But broadly it's true: you can't have a "pure" VLIW architecture independent of the issue and pipeline architecture of the CPU. Any device with differing runtime architecture is going to have to do some cooking of the instructions to match it to its own backend. But that decode engine is much easier to write when it's starting from a wide format that presents lots of instructions and makes explicit promises about their interdependencies.
This precludes any VLIW from having multiple differently constrained implementations. You cannot segment VLIW implementations you can do with as x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, etc, where same code will be executed as optimal as possible on the concrete implementation of ISA.
So - no, Itanium (or any other VLIW for that matter) would not be the new world.