I doubt it. Like Java, WASM is intended to be used with an optimising JIT compiler. It doesn't make sense to try to implement Java or WASM directly in hardware.
ARM used to offer Jazelle, which could run Java bytecode directly on the CPU. It's now long dead. It makes more sense to use a sophisticated optimising JIT to produce efficient machine-code, than to make hardware to directly run an unoptimised IR.
Azul systems made custom hardware for around a decade, tuned for running Java and highly parallel (IIRC they had 256 core systems when Intel was selling 4 core systems). Also had hardware accelerated GC, so people with large heap problems would talk to them.
With the rising ubiquity of Intel VT extensions, they figured out how to put the VM into JVM, particularly for accelerated GC, and it looks like they got out of the hardware business. All I see on their product page is runtimes. And now that Oracle wants to charge people for their JVM, I suspect they have more customers now.
I'm sure it is already in the works. WASM is the key to be independent of the ISA and allows to switch to custom silicon without having the customers to know. That's how cloud vendors will drive the future in the race to get independent from x86 and ARM (very likely that a future owner of ARM will limit the licensing business). So even if there is no performance gain possible due to the reasons you have pointed out, it's probably the abstraction layer of the future for pretty much everything.
Why? As I just said, this kind of hardware approach doesn't make technical sense.
> WASM is the key to be independent of the ISA and allows to switch to custom silicon without having the customers to know.
We already have ISA-independence with JavaScript, Java bytecode, .Net, Python, and other high-level languages.
Again, WASM isn't intended for direct execution on hardware, it's intended to be fed to an optimising JIT compiler. Direct execution on hardware isn't how you get good performance out of an IR like this.
> That's how cloud vendors will drive the future in the race to get independent from x86 and ARM
I don't think cloud vendors care all that much who they buy their CPUs from. AWS offer instances on Intel, AMD, and ARM CPUs. If they really want ISA-freedom, their best bet is RISC-V.
> even if there is no performance gain possible due to the reasons you have pointed out, it's probably the abstraction layer of the future for pretty much everything.
There will never be a single abstraction layer for everything. Compiler engineering doesn't work that way.
I doubt it. Like Java, WASM is intended to be used with an optimising JIT compiler. It doesn't make sense to try to implement Java or WASM directly in hardware.
ARM used to offer Jazelle, which could run Java bytecode directly on the CPU. It's now long dead. It makes more sense to use a sophisticated optimising JIT to produce efficient machine-code, than to make hardware to directly run an unoptimised IR.