Hmm... haven't seen that.. mind linking me?
VLIW5 stands for "Very Long Instruction Word" 5; VLIW standing for the architecture basis, 5 for the number of execution units.
Each shader 'unit' is composed of 5 execution units, 4 of them being 'simple', with the 5th being able to handle all functions, including transcendental functions.
This is one (of many) reasons that AMD's u-arch's generally have more shaders than nvidia, yet has comparable performance; unless the developer specifically codes for this unique computing style, a game will only use some of the execution units. This is also one reason why the theoretical computation power for AMD's u-arch's are far greater than what is actually achieved in actual applications, because AMD's figures assume that all execution units are utilized.
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