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