The quest for improvements in the execution of system instructions whilst upholding processor efficiency begot different discoveries. Hardware solutions, such as having multiprocessors seem to be more expensive and had some challenges with it. Over the years, different software approaches have been discovered and explored. Unfortunately, some of these approaches still hugely depend on the permissibility of the hardware facility which could hinder productivity. Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processor adopts an instruction level parallelism (ILP) method that is fully software based. This paper provides an overview, performs a comparison with other related architectures such as CISC, RISC and highlights VLIW’s development over the years as well as reasons to adopt this technology. The methodology and techniques used in this work include analysis of available documents, and content analysis techniques. This Analysis shows that VLIW machine performed better compared to other traditional machines using instruction’s size, format, semantics as well as memory, registers and hardware design as metrics for comparison. VLIW is indeed a step ahead of the others and allows higher performance without the complexity inherent in other designs.

Very long instruction word