Intel espouses their commitment to the JDK at JavaOne 2016

During his keynote address at JavaOne 2016, Intel’s VP of Intel Software & Services Group, Michael Greene, expressed his enthusiasm for the collaboration between one of the world’s best known technology companies and the most popular programming language on the planet. After overcoming his own version of the technical glitches that seemed to plague several of the keynote speakers, Greene got into the flow of his talk with a look at three ways Intel aims to work with the Java community to make things easy, efficient, and expansive.

Understanding the JDK made easy

Greene started with a look at how the popularity of the JDK and the prolific community that contributes to it have created a need for a better way of visualizing what’s going on. “With so many contributions to the open JDK, we need to understand what things are being contributed to the codebase day after day. This will enable Java developers to make informed decisions about changes we’re making to the codebase.” Michael took this opportunity to announce the new performance portal for the JDK, an Intel website where performance metrics and training information are published for each build. Intel engineers will be actively tracking regressions and working with community members to resolve them.

Some of Intel’s own recent contributions include APIs for performant code, lexicographical array comparison, and checksum support. Making multithreaded applications, including those using MapReduce, more scalable is one way Intel hopes to ease the challenges of Java developers. IoT also featured prominently in Greene’s discussion of ways Intel is working hard on behalf of the programming community. “We’ve added more support for sensors and low energy Bluetooth for healthcare, security, and wearables.” Intel is also serving the enterprise space by extending beyond maker platforms into commercial platforms. Robots, drones, and industrial machines are all in line for innovation with these new features.

Java makes science and social more efficient

ba using Scala, deploying OpenJDK8 on Linux. Back in 2010 during the World Cup, traffic caused the Twitter site to fail over and over. In contrast, Ellen DeGeneres’ viral tweet about Bradley Cooper in 2014 proved the JVM’s ability to allow Twitter activity to scale to 3.3 million events over a period of eleven seconds. Ramani is looking forward to additional OpenJDK improvements that focus on low latency garbage collection and a pause time of less than 10ms.

Java and Intel will help connect the world

Expansion was the final frontier covered in Greene’s keynote. He shared a short, futuristic film that helped audience members visually comprehend the implications of “The Connection Effect”. By 2020, Intel estimates that there will be 50 billion devices and 200 billion sensors deployed throughout the world. This fact has profound implications for software programming. Compute, analytics, and storage will become even more important, and 5G connectivity must become ubiquitous.

Intel and Micron Technology have been collaborating on the 3DXpoint, a revolution in non-volatile memory that is intended to support large datasets. Intel predicts that the Xpoint will be up to 1,000 times faster than NAND with 1,000 times more endurance and ten times the density. Along with next generation field programmable arrays, Intel certainly appears to be gearing up for the expansion that will support a fully connected human ecosystem.