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Azul systems (http://www.azulsystems.com/ http://www.azulsystems.com/) has a special-purpose Java processor, and they do indeed get some impressive speed benefi
by akeefer 17y ago
Azul systems (http://www.azulsystems.com/ http://www.azulsystems.com/) has a special-purpose Java processor, and they do indeed get some impressive speed benefits from it. For example, having single-instruction write barriers in hardware allows them to have nearly-pauseless garbage collection on gigantic heaps.
- bokchoi 17y agoHere's an excellent google tech talk by Cliff Click of Azul talking about their hardware. Among the firehose of information in that talk, he mentions that the hardware guys wanted to add directly execute JVM bytecode. He told them not to bother since he could JIT it better and they wouldn't be able to support all the bytecodes anyway. I'd love to know more about why that is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uljtqyBLxI#t=20m00s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uljtqyBLxI#t=20m00s
- pmjordan 17y agoJITing means you can do dynamic optimisations, e.g. predicting vtable dispatches. Doing this in hardware is tricky.