Very long instruction word

Very long instruction word (VLIW) refers to processor architectures designed to take advantage of instruction level parallelism (ILP). Whereas conventional processors mostly allow programs only to specify instructions that will be executed in sequence, a VLIW processor allows programs to explicitly specify instructions that will be executed at the same time (that is, in parallel). This type of processor architecture is intended to allow higher performance without the inherent complexity of some other approaches.