Speaking at the Microsoft antitrust trial in Washington yesterday, James Gosling described Sun’s forthcoming high-end UltraJava chip as a radical new design – a very strange machine. But it won’t be limited to running Java applications, he said. UltraJava, due to reach the tape-out stage next year, arose from Sun’s Cafe project and was one of the Java processor family Sun first began talking about back in February 1996 (CI No 2,853). The chips were originally expected to reach the market by the end of 1997. When Microsoft lawyer asked Gosling if UltraJava chips were to be optimized for Java, Gosling replied that the chip was intended to be a general purpose CPU. This one doesn’t interpret Java byte code, but uses a very sophisticated virtual machine to run Java applications. UltraJava actually has relatively little in it specific to Java – there are C compilers for it. It would, he said be optimized for Java in small ways. Gosling said that Java – which aims to make applications independent of both operating system and CPU – was the re ason Sun had decided to come up with a new chip architecture. Currently, he said applications are locked into a chip architecture and then the chip cannot evolve. Ten years ago, Sparc was an innovative design, but because of the legacy of applications we’re still locked into it. The Intel x86 architecture is 20 years old. Java gives the two sides a little bit of distance.
