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[AskHN] Anyone working on an ASIC for a JavaScript engine?
1 points by hargup 829 days ago
Javascript runs everywhere, and all the time. Curious if something is trying to build a JS engine in an ASIC (Application specific Integrated Circuit)?f

Might be pretty useful in large data centers.

2 comments

Not an expert, so a more nuanced view may help, but from my understanding, developing an ASIC even for a simple task is a lot of work. JavaScript is already optimized to run on a CPU. It has many different general roles as a language itself, and making an ASIC for JavaScript as a whole would basically be making a CPU itself.

Typically, you don't run a general code engine on an ASIC. They're more for a specific application, where it can do the job it was hard designed for, which is why they're so fast and efficient

Javascript is popular enough that normal CPUs are becoming its ASICs

https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0801/h/A64-Floati...

Interesting. I guess we'll see more JS specific instructions in the CPU.