Very Long Instruction Word

Very Long Instruction Word, or VLIW, refers to an approach to computer architecture that tries to take advantage of instruction level parallelism (ILP). Where conventional designs typically restrict instruction streams to specify one instruction to be executed after another, VLIW allows programs to specify several instructions to be executed at the same time. The programmer (or more likely the compiler) is responsible for identifying ILP and taking advantage of it, keeping the hardware much simpler than approaches where out-of-order execution or multiple instruction issue (superscalar) must be identified at execution time and managed in hardware.