<i>VLIW demands an even &quot;mix&quot; of instruction types, and that&#x27;s largely incompatible with general-purpose application code.</i><p>The Itanium is a great example of this. Benchmarks that pushed the CPU to its limits looked amazing, but real-world performance with general-purpose code was awful. There just isn&#x27;t enough parallelism in general-purpose code to justify extremely huge instruction bundles that will mostly be wasted with NOPs.