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OoO, renaming, branch prediction, microcode have existed for a long time. If anything, more modern CPUs (x86 included) are RISCer than the older generations which had extensive microcode expansion for each instruction.

Even ignoring the fact that the JVM is typed, memory safe and with builtin GC (all things that were tried architecturally in the past and abbandoned), there is still a large difference between the scope and variety of non-local optimizations perfomed by any non-toy VM and the local, strictly realtime, constrained to a small window, set of reordering done by an OoO engine. Even tracing, which is used by some JITs, has been largely abbandoned in the CPU world.

Transmeta and Denver-like dynamic translation is closer to the behaviour of a software JIT and it is certainly considered drastically different from mainstream OoO.




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