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mort96 5 days ago

Itanium is irrelevant to this discussion. x86 works the same as its ARM and RISC-V competitors: a fairly compact, abstract language which describes a program, which depends on an instruction decoder to translate the abstract instructions into microarchitecture-specific instructions. VLIW is a huge departure from that.

When people say "ISA doesn't matter", they mean that the "legacy cruft" in x86 doesn't matter (that much) and that x86 remains competitive with other similar ISAs. It doesn't mean that the difference between VLIW and traditional ISAs doesn't matter. ISA paradigm still matters, just not the "syntax".