very long instruction word (CPU) (VLIW)
Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) is a processor architecture for increasing performance by processing instructions in parallel. In the VLIW architecture, different independent operations are defined with each instruction, which are executed by the hardware in parallel in several execution units.
The number of execution units determines the number of operations of a VLIW instruction. Which operations of an instruction are processed in parallel is determined by the compiler. In the VLIW architecture, an instruction logic loads the VLIW instruction from memory in one cycle and passes it to the execution units.
The VLIW architecture has simple instruction logic, very short cycle times, and word lengths of 128 bits. Each individual VLIW operation corresponds to an instruction in a sequential processor. A VLIW word comprises several operations, which are provided with processing instructions. The processing instructions are interpreted by the compiler and converted into individual sequences.
Intel's Itanium is a central processing unit( CPU) with VLIW architecture.