… at the expense of extra computation and power consumption. And I think the current CISC backends would better by called VLIW.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and people can talk all day about what to call each one.

Absolutely. It's a real shame AMD beat Intel to the x64 punch, or we'd all be running Itanium today. VLIW nevermore....

No, the problem with Itanium is/was that it's no-one knew how to write good compilers for them. Also, VLIW is incredibly close to the hardware and thus bound to be outdated very quickly. It didn't help that IA64 has about 40bits / instruction and thus the least instruction / byte of all the mainstream architectures.

Transmeta had the right idea, they did the x86-to-VLIW dynamically at runtime and in software, coupled with proper code caches. But it seems they were to early -- the market wasn't ready for them.