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In general, hardware optimized for high-level languages have been a failure, usually the extra baggage for handling things as machine-level interpreter slow thi
by russell 17y ago
In general, hardware optimized for high-level languages have been a failure, usually the extra baggage for handling things as machine-level interpreter slow things down nearly as much as a software interpreter. Nothing has been a real commercial success and it isnt for want of trying. Off the top of my head I can think of the Burroughs B5500 which had hardware support for typed data, the Lisp Machine, and the Intel 432. Sun had a Java machine specification, but I dont think anyone ever bit.
- Tuna-Fish 17y agoThere's Jazelle for ARM, it's essentially a instruction overlay that makes the cpu execute all simple and common java bytecodes directly, and call a kernel function for all the hard ones. However, even that is dying -- it is being replaced by the thumbEE, which is a more generic instruction set designed for efficient code generation from intermediate dynamic code.
- LogicHoleFlaw 17y agoIBM has plug-in hardware JVMs for its mainframe big iron. They are ungodly expensive.
- jacquesm 17y agoI can't find anything about that, it's quite interesting do you have a link ? edit: found it: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-135319.html http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-135319.html
- ShardPhoenix 17y agoAccording to Wikipedia, "zAAPs are not specifically optimized to run Java faster or better". Apparently they're just normal IBM mainframe processors crippled to only run Java and XML.
- jacquesm 17y agoThere is forth on hardware, and a long tradition of that. It's still alive and kicking.
- agazso 17y agoThere is Azul Systems, that produces massive servers for Java applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azul_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azul_Systems I don't know how successful they are economically though.