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Most DSP archs came out of thr 90's and many of the cores today are a reflection of that trend (ceva etc). I worked on the TigerSharc DSP for 8 years and can tell you that from an implementation standpoint they can be a nightmare! Not sure they do have a viable place long term from an economical perspective.

In DSPs, sure, but not in general-purpose CPUs or GPUs.

I suspect the DSP makers just use VLIW because of interia. They probably don't have the money or incentive to revisit their old decisions.

Also wouldn't you say that most of the stuff that used to be implemented on DSPs is now moving into ASICs? I wouldn't be so sure that VLIWs are going to be around forever.

VLIW is many times cheaper (in terms of power and area) than OoO. It is not going anywhere from the low budget range.

But VLIW and OoO aren't the only two design points. The renewed interest in traditional inorder vector processors. In any case, I do think the point of DSPs was to be area/power efficient for certain specialized algorithms, and a lot of these are just becoming ASICs/specialized accelerators today.