Re:NetBSD on a JavaStation
by aleph_minus_one on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @10:36AM
(#43267954)
> I remember seeing a Java microprocessor for sale years ago. It claimed that the CPUs native instruction set is Java bytecode.
Could it be some older ARM core supporting Jazelle?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle
concretely possibly a ARM926EJ-S?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM9#ARM9E-S_and_ARM9EJ-S
Various other "Java processors" are listed on
nah it was a processor whose native instruction set was java bytecode. it garbage collected natively, and all the other stuff. It was not Jazelle, nor was it an ARM CPU which interpreted bytecode and ran it.
I think it was the "aJile" processor listed in your final link, but I'm not 100% sure. It was over 20 years ago that I read about it and was about to buy a development kit when I got pulled off of all java work I was doing.
I can't find that exact microcontroller that I remember, I think the domain is gone, but there are other things like this, including some FPGA cores which make the same claim that I remember from that microcontroller I read about in the early 2000s. I wonder how those would perform compared to a JVM running on a traditional instruction set on the same FPGA.