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.