Re: Rolling rolling rolling ... rawhide
EPIC was doomed before it left the drawing board for three reasons - both of which were already apparent from the short life of Multiflow Computer Inc - and these reasons were (IIRC) articulated by a number of well-seasoned computer architects on USENET (which back then included folks who worked on the DEC Alpha, ARM, PA-RISC, MIPS, SPARC, POWER, x86 (incl x86-64) - see Andy Glew's posts on the topic in particular).
1) Dynamic Scheduling is always better than static scheduling because a) it adapts to what is actually happening in real time and b) it can work in conjunction with static scheduling.
2) Static scheduling requires large register files and wide datapaths in whatever fabrication process you choose. This means that a VLIW style design will inevitably have a lower clock rate in a given implementation technology relative to say it's RISC peers. The only way a VLIW machine can compensate for this is to widen the datapaths - which again forces the clock to be slower (to manage skew), thus compounding the problem.
3) Advances in hardware fabrication & implementation vastly outpaced any benefits attributable to VLIW.
Full disclosure - I liked the idea of VLIW, it's just that whenever it was implemented in hardware it ended up being slow and more complicated than whatever else was current.
On the plus side Multiflow's efforts were not totally wasted. They did have to write a very good compiler. Their compiler was very well regarded and licensed by competitors who promptly put it to work compiling code for RISC chips (during the peak period of the compiler wars)... The big register files are still with us, but they are implementation details - rather than architectural details, thus modern processors can (and do) take advantage of wide issue and huge register files when and where it suits the implementation...
I think the real point of EPIC was to sink the competitors but leave the x86 alive at the low end, which didn't pan out because AMD spoilt the party with AMD64.
IIRC Linus Torvalds spent some time working for Transmeta on a VLIW architecture - which also sank without (much) trace...