Intel's Open Runtime Platform Specs

prostoalex writes "The new issue of Intel Technology Journal has a lengthy article on a new platform, developed in Intel labs. The Open Runtime Platform: A Flexible High-Performance Managed Runtime Environment describes the platform that is capable of running both Java VM and Microsoft's CLI, on both Windows and Linux platforms. Full PDF version is also available."

Comments

Article Distilled:

[Ayanami Rei]

We managed to create a virtual machine that is the superset of the .NET CLR and the JVM. This super-vm can compile straight into machine code for IA-32 and Itanium, and it can do it dynamically in realtime through profiling. It also has a bunch of different optimizers and garbage collectors it can pick from.

All this is implemented in C++. They use opensource class libraries to provide the classpaths.

What I would find really cool is if they can release a microcode-based CPU that runs the superset bytecode. It may simply be a microcode patch to the Itanium. That would be truely wicked.

Relative performance to microsoft CLI...?

[rhyd]

Although the pdf has a pretty comparison graph of performance with Sun's JVM (which intel wins) there is no such analysis of intel's MRTE against microsofts CLR. I dunno but suspect there is gonna be a MS EULA that absolutely forbids publishing benchmark results of the MS CLR. Either that of intel's MRTE was slower! Anyone read the EULA?

The only thing I got from the article was an appreciation of just how much the MS.NET developers copied the Java architecture. It would seem that to achieve the grand unification of CLR and JVM the Intel engineers just had to define a 1-1 mapping between buzzwords ;)

(
gripe: "runtime" is only one word so it should be called MRE... i guess that name was avoided because it is associated with Jim Carey's villan in Batman Forever :)
)