> has not been successful for general-purpose code

Let me interject that it has also not been successful for AMD's line of videocards - they used a VLIW architecture before transitioning to a SIMD architecture codenamed Graphics Core Next or GCN in 2011. nVidia had been using SIMD for quite a while before that, but some of their latest cards have a few VLIW features like the option to explicitly specify parallelism between instructions.