So, the guys at Azul actually had this sort of business plan back in 2005, but they found that it was unsustainable and turned their attention to the software side, where they have done great work. I remember having a discussion with someone about Java processors and my common was just “Lisp machines.” It’s very difficult to outperform code running on commodity processor architectures. That train is so big and moving so fast, you really have to pick your niche (e.g. GPUs) to deliver something that outperforms it. Too much investment ($$$ and brainpower) flowing that direction. Even if you’re successful for one generation, you need to grow sales and have multiple designs in the pipeline at once. It’s nearly impossible.

That said, I do see opportunities to add “assistance hardware” to commodity architectures. Given the massive shift to managed runtimes, all of which use GC, over the last couple decades, it’s shocking to me that nobody has added a “store barrier” instruction or something like that. You don’t need to process Java in hardware or even do full GC in hardware, but there are little helps you could give that would make a big difference, similar to what was done with “multimedia” and crypto instructions in x86 originally.