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Topic: ASIC JVM? (Read 1197 times)

sr. member
Activity: 405
Merit: 255
@_vjy
March 14, 2013, 12:28:18 AM
#6
I think JVM is RISC architecture, which is good for mobile processors.
May be google do this better, but hopefully Oracle won't let Google..

Android mobile phones and all-java apps would then be entirely different..
just think about what a quad-core JVM, directly implemented into processor, can do.. Smiley
sr. member
Activity: 405
Merit: 255
@_vjy
March 13, 2013, 11:43:04 PM
#5
There is so much news about JVM implementation into hardware.. How did I miss?  Roll Eyes
sr. member
Activity: 405
Merit: 255
@_vjy
March 13, 2013, 11:41:08 PM
#4
...
A modern chip fab costs literally 100s of millions of BTC.
...

There is nothing in this world costs more than ~21 million BTC.. Grin
newbie
Activity: 23
Merit: 0
March 13, 2013, 10:23:27 AM
#3
Just wondering.. Even though there is so much support for java (millions of programmers, billions of users, etc.), why dont' we see JVM implemented into silicon yet??  Roll Eyes

It's been tried (and mostly failed, apart from embedded smartcard devices) several times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor

IMO, the reason is this ...

Intel and AMD invest a huge amount of money into building the fastest possible general purpose CPUs. A modern chip fab costs literally 100s of millions of BTC. They also have decades of experience designing chips.

It's true that in theory a CPU designed to execute Java directly could be faster than an Intel/AMD CPU running a software JVM. But in practice, no-one else has the money and experience to build a CPU anywhere near as fast as Intel/AMD - so that advantage remains theoretical.

Where you can beat Intel/AMD is by concentrating on tasks that general purpose CPUs aren't very good at - such as tasks that benefit from massively parallelism. Things like graphics rendering, video decoding, SHA256 hashing, ...

However, executing Java bytecode isn't one of these tasks - it's a complex, unpredictable, non-parallelisable task.

A company called Azul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azul_Systems came close to succeeding with custom Java hardware - they used to produce special hardware (Vega Java Compute Appliances) which massively sped up Java garbage collection in particular. However, it was never quite compelling enough to make companies decide to go out and buy very expensive Azul servers instead of just buying more off the shelf Intel x86 servers ...
legendary
Activity: 2142
Merit: 1010
Newbie
March 13, 2013, 03:52:07 AM
#2
why dont' we see JVM implemented into silicon yet??  Roll Eyes

Coz of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization.
sr. member
Activity: 405
Merit: 255
@_vjy
March 13, 2013, 12:34:16 AM
#1
Just wondering.. Even though there is so much support for java (millions of programmers, billions of users, etc.), why dont' we see JVM implemented into silicon yet??  Roll Eyes

but, Bitcoin is only 4 years old and we have ASIC machines now..  Wink
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