Azul hardware had a very large core count of low-performing cores. If you had enough parallelism then it was hard to beat - but most applications didn't have enough parallel work, so the market wasn't big enough

I… just got corrected by Cliff Click~! (You're like my language implementation hero (along with Mike Pall).)

Vega sounds like it would have a nice niche in network processing. Shame it didn't find a big enough market. It was pretty interesting from what I read.

Thanks, I had no idea they started with hardware. For anyone else not that familiar it looks like Vega is the hardware appliance and Zing is the VM version.

I have board with 2 Vega chips in my living room - 24 cores each; each a full 64-bit RISC with 32 registers and ie754 FP math, read & write barriers in hardware; inline-cache virtual calls in hardware, and transactional memory. Later chip versions had 48 and then 54 cores, and you could jam 16 chips in a cache-coherent shared memory box - with top-10 supercomputer bandwidth. But you needed 54*16 parallel working threads to use it all. :-) Cliff

So in the bit of reading I've done it seems like the idea of read and write barriers in hardware were what allowed them to have puase-less GC and that was the primary reason for Azul producing hardware appliances. Is that accurate? At least initially?

What did that board cost you if you don't mind my asking? What does it cost you to run it is maybe a better question.

It was cheaper to run (power, heat, space) than the equivalent pile of X86's of that era and for years to come. Each box cost between $250k and $750k depending on cores & memory. You didn't buy one unless you had a specific scaling problem that scale-out x86's weren't cutting it.