another bytecode interpreter ?

It's also _extremely_ unlikely that you are going to need to limit your computation to a single core. Using multiple cores is trivial if you have multiple communication streams to process (put each stream on it's own core, or processing of data from each interface on it's own core, etc). But even if you have one stream to process, you can almost always find a way to split the workload across multiple cores (one core works on what you are sending now, the second works on what you will be sending in a few hundred ms, etc)

so the move to multiple cores does end up helping the processing of things like this.