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Technology Stocks : NCDI - Network Computing Devices

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To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (3042)	9/23/1997 9:45:00 AM
From: Doug Klein	of 4453

re: Java chips I'm still a bit skeptical on the idea of dedicated Java chips. I have to admit that we haven't done tons of objective research in the area, (a little hard, since none of them actually exist :), but I have two 'gut level' issues. First, processors dedicated to a 'language' seem dangerously constraining to me. I'm not sure I can come up with a good reason to re-write existing software just so that it is in Java. Last week I had yet another request to re-write the entire X11 server in Java. Why bother? The second problem I have is based on some data I saw from IBM internal testing. Running 'typical' Java tests showed only 20% of the cpu time spent interpreting Java byte codes. That says to me, at least, the best you could do is get an overall 20% gain from a Java specific chip. Since the remaining 80% is off running O/S stuff, it just seems that you'd be better off making the O/S support very fast. I could be very wrong here, (a lot more analysis needs to be done once some of this stuff is real), but at least that's a good enough first cut to explain why we're just continuing on with 'plain old microprocessors'. On the performance side, we're seeing quite significant gains in the JVM, especially with some recent focus put on by our IBM partners. (When the smart people in IBM come out, very interesting things happen.) The chip technology announced by IBM is just another piece of the amazing performance gains we're going to see over the next few years in microprocessor performance.

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