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AMD looks for ways to optimize Java on 'Shanghai'


By David Worthington
December 17, 2008 — 
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is researching techniques to boost the performance of Java Virtual Machines that run on its "Shanghai" processor, which it has begun producing.

Shanghai is a quad-core processor, produced at a 45nm technology node, that features increased cache size, a new iteration of HyperTransport and reduced power consumption. The chip also uses AMD's Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) performance monitoring technique.

The company is working with JVM developers, including IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems, to build a framework that uses information provided by IBS to improve the performance of JVMs, said Ben Pollan, manager of AMD's Java Labs. He added that the work was happening in research, and it could take several years until production JVMs leverage IBS.

In another technique, AMD is leveraging parallel programming by providing JVMs with better management of hardware resources in multicore processors.

For instance, garbage collection may be assigned to certain processor cores, while graphics operations are offloaded to the graphics processing unit (GPU), Pollan explained.

"Offloading graphics to the GPU is a natural path [for AMD] after the ATI acquisition," he said. AMD acquired graphics chipmaker ATI in 2006, and it has recently worked to merge CPU and GPU programming by creating a unified software development kit that supports Open Computing Language. AMD's work that is applicable to JVM developers, however, remains in research.

In the near term, the company is continuing to offer short-term revisions and optimizations through its performance engineering process, Pollan said. AMD contributes code to the OpenJDK community to streamline that process, he added.


Related Search Term(s): Java, multicore, AMD


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