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Implementation of a Java Processor on a FPGA (2016)

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56 points mghackerlady | 2 comments | 20 Nov 25 06:40 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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larsbrinkhoff ◴[20 Nov 25 07:35 UTC] No.45989967[source]▶
What happened to

1. Sun's JavaStation, 2. ARM's Jazelle, ??? 3. Profit!

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1. phire ◴[20 Nov 25 09:16 UTC] No.45990667[source]▶
Jazelle worked for its target market (or at least, I've never seen anyone claim otherwise).

But its target market wasn't "faster java". Instead Jazelle promised better performance than an interpreter, with lower power draw than an interpreter, but without the memory footprint and complexity of a JIT. It was never meant to be faster than a JIT.

Jazelle made a lot of sense in the early 2000s where dumb phones where running J2ME applets on devices with only 1-4MB of memory, but we quickly moved onto smartphones with 64MB+ of memory, and it just made more sense to use a proper JIT.

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JavaStation might as well been vaporware. Sure, the product line existed, but the promised "Super JavaStation" with a "java coprocessor" never arrived, so you were really just paying sun for a standard computer with Java pre-installed.

replies(1): >>45991191 #
2. markb139 ◴[20 Nov 25 10:29 UTC] No.45991191[source]▶
I briefly worked in a team that implemented a JVM on a mobile OS (before the iPhone) and one of the senior devs said Jazelle was in effect very inefficient because of all the context switching between ARM mode and Jazelle mode. Turned out a carefully tuned ARM JVM was in practice th best