It isn't an OoO, at least, not a 224 window OoO. 7-wide can simply mean that it has the decode and execution resources of 7 per cycle. It's a tablet core, they don't have a 7-wide OoO core in there.
I was at the EE380 talk :). It's amazing how few people show up to EE380 these days.
Yeah, Denver is in-order superscalar and it's a JIT but it isn't VLIW. Sad to say, they've tried JITing to in-order superscalar as well. They had a design win with the Nexus but even now NVidia is switching over to RISC-V for Falcon.
It is not from lack of effort that the JIT approach hasn't really worked. It's competitive but not outstanding. Denver, from the EE380 talk, thrives on bad bloated code. It's not so good on good code. This is not a winning combination.
Well, Falcon is intended to be a controller, not a (relatively) high performance core, so that's not an apples to apples comparison. If it's not VLIW, then what is it? In-order superscalar? You mean superpipelined or scoreboarded (like an ancient Cray?)?
Bad bloated code is 90%+ of the code in the world ;)
Also, shoot me an email at sixsamuraisoldier@gmail.com you seem to have some inside info on Denver, I'd love to chat (don't worry, I won't steal any secrets ;) )
https://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26...
Also, the ee380 presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEuXA0_9feM