A quantitative study for Java microprocessor architectural requirements. Part I: Instruction set design

Abstract Java was designed for network programming. This imposes certain requirements on its virtual machine instruction set architecture and on designs that support Java. The purpose of this study is to carry out a behavioral analysis of the different aspects of Java instruction set architecture. This will help in establishing the hardware requirements for executing Java bytecodes. First, the bytecode interpreter was instrumented to include performance counters and statistics collectors. Then performance metrics were collected through benchmarking. Analyzing these data helps to identify performance-critical aspects that are candidates for hardware support, while less critical aspects can be left for software implementations. In this first part of our two-part paper, we study access patterns for data types, addressing modes, and instruction encoding. Recommendations for architectural requirements for Java processors will be made throughout this study.

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