[nadavwr]

Running bytecode instructions in hardware essentially means a hardware-based interpreter. It likely would have been the best performing interpreter for the hardware, but JIT-compilation to native code still would run circles around it.

During years when this instruction set was relevant (though apparently unutilized), Oracle still had very limited ARM support for Java SE, so having a fast interpreter could have been desirable -- but it makes no sense on beefier ARM systems that are able to support decent JIT or AOT support available nowadays.