Chips will never run java/vb/C++ natively. Chips execute instructions, and those languages contain constructs which are not instructions.

See a great discussion at http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/14527/any-pro...

(The Java demo you saw was probably Jazelle, which is a processor module on ARM chips that runs (some) Java assembly language instructions natively, instead of using a virtualized processor. That's possible for a lot of VM-based languages, but it's not running Java.

Modern chips don't run x86_64 assembly language either. That's just an compatibility layer that is translated away from as soon as possible.

You mean like Jazelle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle that hardly anyone used?

Gosling came to my school and did a demo of an RV using something like that -- i wish i remembered the chip name

"hardly anyone used" <-- this is why assembly still survives. I still use a fair bit of it for commands that glibc doesnt wrap (i.e. RDTSC)