This week in Santa Clara, ARM and Sun are demonstrating the fruits of their recent collaboration at the ARM Techcon3 conference (http://armtechcon3.crowdvine.com/). In particular, ARM is demonstrating systems with the new quad-core Cortex-A9 embedded processor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A9_MPCore), along with Sun's latest Java SE 6 Embedded (u16) built specifically to use those ARM cores. As a result, the JVM and applications running on it scale extremely well - in an embedded environment.

You can read more about Sun's Java SE Embedded versions (available for a matrix of many processor/OS combinations, such as Windows XP Embedded or Linux on Atom, ARM, PowerPC, OMap, Freescale, and so on) here: http://java.sun.com/javase/embedded/index.jsp

The really interesting part of all of this is that we're beginning to see embedded environments that support multiple cores - four in this particular case. It won't be too long before smart phones, handhelds, PDAs, dedicated kisosks, tablet computers, printers and scanners, kids toys, <insert your ideas here> all have processors with multiple cores in them. Imagine the power and potential of these devices, at relatively low cost and power consumption! And Java is right there, ready now to help you take advantage of them.

Happy coding!

-EJB