Originally posted by bridgman
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2. PowerVR SGX gpus, as far as I know, are VLIW processors with SIMD execution capabilities, but it is indeed true that ATI was the first company to make a VLIW SIMD GPU.
3. The equivalent to VLIW in a modern day X86 CPU is absolutely nothing, I think you are confused with the term "pipelined superscalar", which also describes the ability to execute and process more than 1 instruction per cycle. To exemplify further, you can have a pure CISC design that executes more than 1 instruction per clock (A pipelined superscalar 1 cycle latency for everything Pentium 1 kind of thing).
4. This one is pretty hard for me to understand. Haven't there been programming languages for every type of processor since ever? Aren't APIS supposed to be hardware agnostic? I'm sure the LLVMpipe could prove this one! (BTW, the stable instruction set you talk about isn't VLIW, it's Intel's EPIC, which is based on VLIW but adresses its shortcomings.)
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