VLIW DSPs are in every phone. VLIW CPUs are almost certainly a bad idea and as to GPUs, AFAIK VLIW needs to coexist with barrel threading there which might create problems. But VLIW certainly has its place.

Most DSP archs came out of thr 90's and many of the cores today are a reflection of that trend (ceva etc). I worked on the TigerSharc DSP for 8 years and can tell you that from an implementation standpoint they can be a nightmare! Not sure they do have a viable place long term from an economical perspective.

In DSPs, sure, but not in general-purpose CPUs or GPUs.

I suspect the DSP makers just use VLIW because of interia. They probably don't have the money or incentive to revisit their old decisions.

Also wouldn't you say that most of the stuff that used to be implemented on DSPs is now moving into ASICs? I wouldn't be so sure that VLIWs are going to be around forever.

VLIW is many times cheaper (in terms of power and area) than OoO. It is not going anywhere from the low budget range.

But VLIW and OoO aren't the only two design points. The renewed interest in traditional inorder vector processors. In any case, I do think the point of DSPs was to be area/power efficient for certain specialized algorithms, and a lot of these are just becoming ASICs/specialized accelerators today.

nVidia Kepler and Maxwell (i.e. the two latest archs ATM) use VLIW instruction encoding

Do they? I can't find anything about it. VLIW for GPUs is always only mentioned in the context of AMD TeraScale – which has been obsoleted in favour of a RISC architecture five years ago.

I guess that's because unlike AMD, nVidia doesn't officially document the GPU instruction set. But if you disassemble .cubin with nvdisasm, you'd see that code of Kepler/Maxwell is organized in bundles of 4/8 words, where the first word doesn't encode any instruction. Here is what Scott Gray of Nervana Systems, who developed a native assembler for Maxwell, write about it[1]: "Starting with the Kepler architecture Nvidia has been moving some control logic off of the chip and into kernel instructions which are determined by the assembler. This makes sense since it cuts down on die space and power usage, plus the assembler has access to the whole program and can make more globally optimal decisions about things like scheduling and other control aspects. The op codes are already pretty densely packed so Nvidia added a new type of op which is a pure control code. On Kepler there is 1 control instruction for every 7 operational instructions. Maxwell added additional control capabilities and so has 1 control for every 3 instructions."

[1] https://github.com/NervanaSystems/maxas/wiki/Control-Codes