The recent Erlang release (21) changed a lot of the internal interpreter structure with a nod in Mike Pall's direction. Just by shortening the typical opcode size down, they gained 20% speed boost. And the BEAM is a pretty good interpreter anyway.

JITing the beast has been a want for a while, but there are also other paths taken right now which can provide speed boosts, among other a translation of the compiler to use SSA-representations.