We have been working for some time on a standard Oracle JDK 8 port to the upcoming introduction of 64-bit servers based on the new ARMv8 micro architecture. At ARM TechCon 2013 in Santa Clara, California, we announced a roadmap with an expected GA in 2015. This project is going very well and is ahead of schedule. We will soon be at the point where we will make binaries available outside of Oracle - first in a managed beta program with select customers/partners, and sometime during the fall of 2014 as a public early access program. Unless something changes, we are looking at a early 2015 GA. We should be able to share a detailed ramp down and GA plan by JavaOne 2014.

One of the things we (obviously) need to produce a high-quality port is hardware for development and QA. We are therefore happy to announce that we will be collaborating with Cavium on this project. Cavium has been a supporter of the Java ecosystem for a long time and we have numerous joint customers running various Java versions on Cavium MIPS and ARM-based hardware. Cavium has now agreed to provide us with development hardware and engineering resources so that we can certify and optimize the initial Oracle JDK 8 release on Cavium's ThunderX hardware. This is expected to improve quality and performance of JDK 8 on ARMv8 in general, as well as on Cavium's hardware.

For more information:

• Cavium announcement on the ThunderX product family
• Cavium announcement on Oracle collaboration

As a reminder, we plan to release the Oracle JDK 8 port to 64-bit ARMv8 under the royalty-free (for general purpose servers etc) Binary Code License, but we have no current plans to open source it.