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People might start baking chips that can natively run web assembly at some point. If that happens we have found a very expensive path from running native binari

by cjfd 7y ago

People might start baking chips that can natively run web assembly at some point. If that happens we have found a very expensive path from running native binaries to running native binaries for the purpose of making this independent of the platform.

not_a_cop75 7y ago
Lol. Well, I mean nothing is outside of the realm of possibility, but remember those native Java chips! Some thought those were going to be a big win. And then you had companies like Transmeta trying to do the exact opposite - interpretively optimize all the things....or something like that.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Ultimately the features involved in optimizing WebAssembly are even more variable than they are for Java, so a Jazelle approach is probably even less useful.
- CalChris 7y ago
  Transmeta JIT'd x86 into VLIW. That was right before the Power Wall became an obstacle and CPUs were already burning up. Transmeta in a sense invented low power computing but then Intel said thank you very much; we'll take it from here. It wasn't that they didn't deliver. It's just that they were competing against Intel in the x86 space. A lot of the Transmeta team moved to nVidia and work on Denver but that's different and they got an architecture license from ARM to do that.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
A long time ago they were talking about Java chips. That didn’t materialize and as far as I know there are no chips that run JavaScript natively so I wouldn’t hold my breath for WebAssembly chips.
- CalChris 7y ago
  The Java chips were for, well, they were for Java. If ARM had designed Jazelle to be more general, it would have been useful for Javascript and Python and .... But they designed it for Java bytecode. The licensing was too expensive and so it didn't catch on and Jazelle got dropped from ARMv8.
RubenSandwich 7y ago
I don't know you are being downvoted. There are already instructions in ARM chips to help with JS floating-point conversion [1]. Yes, while the "Java chips" never got into the mass market[2], JS and it's ecosystem is eatting the world in a way Java never did and the trajectory is only increaing. P.S. I know WASM isn't JS, but I'd still consider it in the JS ecosystem. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chips-have-an-instruction-with-javascript-in-the-name-fjcvtzs https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chip... [2]: I did hear about some "Java Chips" for garbage collection back in the day.
smallWheel 7y ago
The web assembly application could also be compiled to a native binary, right? (something like an AOT compiled electron app)

by cjfd 7y ago

not_a_cop75 7y ago

Lol. Well, I mean nothing is outside of the realm of possibility, but remember those native Java chips! Some thought those were going to be a big win. And then you had companies like Transmeta trying to do the exact opposite - interpretively optimize all the things....or something like that.

microcolonel 7y ago
Ultimately the features involved in optimizing WebAssembly are even more variable than they are for Java, so a Jazelle approach is probably even less useful.
CalChris 7y ago
Transmeta JIT'd x86 into VLIW. That was right before the Power Wall became an obstacle and CPUs were already burning up. Transmeta in a sense invented low power computing but then Intel said thank you very much; we'll take it from here. It wasn't that they didn't deliver. It's just that they were competing against Intel in the x86 space. A lot of the Transmeta team moved to nVidia and work on Denver but that's different and they got an architecture license from ARM to do that.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

A long time ago they were talking about Java chips. That didn’t materialize and as far as I know there are no chips that run JavaScript natively so I wouldn’t hold my breath for WebAssembly chips.

CalChris 7y ago
The Java chips were for, well, they were for Java. If ARM had designed Jazelle to be more general, it would have been useful for Javascript and Python and .... But they designed it for Java bytecode. The licensing was too expensive and so it didn't catch on and Jazelle got dropped from ARMv8.

RubenSandwich 7y ago

I don't know you are being downvoted. There are already instructions in ARM chips to help with JS floating-point conversion [1]. Yes, while the "Java chips" never got into the mass market[2], JS and it's ecosystem is eatting the world in a way Java never did and the trajectory is only increaing. P.S. I know WASM isn't JS, but I'd still consider it in the JS ecosystem. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chips-have-an-instruction-with-javascript-in-the-name-fjcvtzs https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chip... [2]: I did hear about some "Java Chips" for garbage collection back in the day.

smallWheel 7y ago

The web assembly application could also be compiled to a native binary, right? (something like an AOT compiled electron app)