VLIW: The unlikeliest computer architecture

The computer architecture community of the late 1970s and early 1980s thought that a few things had been established and no longer needed questioning. One of these was the amount of intrinsic parallelism embedded in normal object code. Making what they considered to be self-evident assumptions about correctness, Tjaden and Flynn established that there was, on average, only a factor of two parallelism available. Breakthroughs often come from people who somehow transcend the assumptions and have the guts to follow the newly revealed path wherever it leads. This phenomenon first hand with Josh Fisher´s VLIW work.