High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Very long instruction word or VLIW refers to a CPU architecture designed to take advantage of instruction level parallelism (ILP). A processor that executes every instruction one after the other (i.e. a non-pipelined scalar architecture) may use processor resources inefficiently, potentially leading to poor performance. The performance can be improved by executing different sub-steps of sequential instructions simultaneously (this is pipelining), or even executing multiple instructions entirely simultaneously as in superscalar architectures. Further improvement can be achieved by executing instructions in an order different from the order they appear in the program; this is called out-of-order execution.