The HSA Foundation, an industry group dedicated to heterogeneous computing, has announced that it plans to develop native support for parallel processing for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). That would make it much easier for Java developers to tap into the capabilities of GPUs and other co-processors to improve application performance and extend battery life in mobile computers.
The HSA standards are expected to be supported in Java 9, currently due for release in 2015.
“Ultimately the parallel acceleration belongs in the Java virtual machine, and hopefully that is where it will reside,” said HSA President Phil Rogers, who also works for chip maker AMD.
HSA members include AMD, Qualcomm and ARM, but not Intel, which is working on its own parallel programming tools.