Java Silicon, Without Sun
By Gale Morrison -- 11/5/01
Electronic News
Research Triangle Park, N.C.?Microsoft Corp. may be doing its almighty best to squash Java, but the fact remains that wireless communications providers need it, want it and are deploying it. The NTT DoCoMos, the Sprints and the Motorolas of the world have only Java to get broadband wireless services to the paying masses.
So, while Scott McNealy's dream of network computers and their native Java processors is all but dead, there is clearly a place?in the palm of your hand, at least?for silicon to accelerate Java performance. The question is: How are OEMs supposed to get it?
McNealy's company, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., stopped developing native Java processors about three years ago, and virtually no one has taken up the native execution mantle since.
Rightfully so, said Ron Stein, senior marketing manager at privately held Nazomi Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif.
"Microprocessors with Java as the native instruction set (are) going to be doomed to minimal acceptance because there is no third-party infrastructure for that?no tools, no support. Anybody that would want to adopt or embrace that technology would have to hand-roll a lot of stuff," Stein said.
But it's doubtful that a separate coprocessor chip for acceleration, as we've seen come to the graphics mainstream, is the answer, either. Even though Stein said the added "board real estate is not a showstopper?even in wireless," ARM Ltd., the hands-down silicon leader in wireless embedded systems, believes interfacing the Java accelerator silicon to the CPU has the potential to stop the show?and would probably argue Stein's real-estate point, too.
"We considered a coprocessor type of implementation before we developed Jazelle," said Steve Steele, Java program manager for ARM in Cambridge, England. "We considered that for the embedded space it was not an ideal solution. The trouble with coprocessors is that they essentially live outside the core and are a compromise?If you are interfacing to the core, you can't really get the performance that you would perhaps expect," Steele said.
ARM's answer is 12,000 gates of Java extensions to its mainstream ARM7 and ARM9 architectures, with plans for at least one "ej"?embedded Java?ARM implementation in every ARM product family going forward. ARM calls these extensions Jazelle and says they act as a byte code interpreter. The company began development toward this end almost three years ago.
On the other hand, Nazomi is offering customers semiconductor intellectual property for a coprocessor core that totals about 31,000 gates, Stein said. ARM believes customers are going to count every gate.
"Typically a coprocessor will be several times larger than Jazelle," Steele said. "And that extra number of gates, it's going to be at least three to five times bigger as a coprocessor; it really does impact the manufacturing.
"There's such a lot of pressure on our customers to bring down the price of their hardware," he said. "The last thing they needed is to increase the cost."
But Stein says that while Nazomi's JSTAR technology may be bigger, the company has engineered a way to avoid rewriting ARM compilers or going back to ARM at all.
"(ARM's solution) isn't transparent enough," Stein said. "The OEM has to get an upgrade from their tools vendor. All the ARM compilers have to change?the OS kernels have to change. A lot of things have to change."
He said Nazomi has what other microprocessor core vendors, such as Transilica Inc. and ARC Ltd. and in-house teams such as Motorola Inc. and Intel Corp., need. He said Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Texas Instruments Inc. have signed on, and at least half of all their licensees are using what ARM IP they have and adding Nazomi instead of a new ARM Jazelle core.
And Stein hinted that the critical Japanese market, where telecom giant NTT DoCoMo is leading the world into 3G wireless, is about to weigh in on Nazomi.
"For Java-enabled wireless handsets, (OEMs have) all found that the Java software solution, even with integrated compilers, is just insufficient. And folks are looking to leapfrog the current hardware solutions," Stein said. But they are not ready to say how yet. "They want to keep the kimono closed until they actually announce their (3G-ready) products. There's a huge cloak of silence right now."
Stein said the realization among OEMs over the last 12 months that Java hardware is required has been something of a relief in his job at Nazomi.
"I'd been looking for the light at the end of tunnel," he said. "For the first six months, we had to go out and force our way into meetings. But for the last six months, we're being called in."
Still, others may bet on the incumbent here, namely ARM. If ARM has engineered its cores well enough, and the handset and other embedded system OEMs can get what they need from Jazelle?and ARM has proven itself exceptionally adept at this kind of engineering?those OEMs might be hard-pressed to take on another third-party integration task and third-party IP licensing task, too.
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