A performance analysis of an object-oriented processor

Java is relatively a new object-oriented programming (OOP) language. It has the advantages of object-oriented languages such as encapsulation, polymorphism, dynamic binding and inheritance. Consequently programs developed by Java are more reliable and secure and Java is widely used in embedded system and the other application areas. However, as traditional computer architectures RISC and CISC [4] do not provide much hardware support for OOP, their performance for OOP is notoriously poor. In this paper, a performance analysis of an object-oriented processor jHISC is presented, which supports most object oriented instructions in hardware level. By comparing the cycle count of related instructions with PicoJava II, it can speed up the execution of object-oriented related instructions from 700% to 1700% and overall performance from 390% to 630%.