Sure, but in my mind it feels like the CPU is slurping up individual instructions until it has enough to execute a whole bunch of them at once in one step (which would be equivalent to a big VLIW).
It's not really like that, it's more that it slurps up individual instructions, executes some of them just in the front-end via register renaming and dispatches the rest to available execution units, then retires them as the execution units are done. Sometimes it fuses together a couple of instruction (macro-op fusion) but my understanding is that that's much more limited, like fusing "compare then conditionally branch" sequences into single compare-and-branch μops
