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Definition: Java chip


An earlier CPU chip specifications from Sun that contained RAM, I/O and the Java Virtual Machine. Based on Sun's picoJava architecture, Java chips were designed to speed up applications by natively executing Java bytecode. Introduced in the late 1990s, designs were licensed to several manufacturers.

MicroJava and UltraJava (MAJC)
The microJava chip was targeted towards controllers, network-based devices and consumer products. The UltraJava chip, later renamed Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing (MAJC), was a multicore CPU targeted for desktop use, incorporating some of the same 3D graphics processing Sun used in its UltraSPARC machines.

In the decade following the introduction of the Java chip, pre-compiling Java source code for a particular platform, the use of just-in-time compiling and the ongoing speed improvements in general-purpose CPUs, negated the initial benefits of having Java circuits in hardware. See Sun and Java.