In the chosen answer for this question about Blue Ruby, Chuck says:
All of the current Ruby implementations are compiled to bytecode. Contrary to
This is possibly a little off topic but...
Iron Ruby is a .net based implementation of ruby and therefore is usually compiled to byte code and then JIT compiled to machine language at runtime (i.e. not interpreted). Also (at least with other .net languages, so I assume with ruby) ngen can be used to generate a compiled native binary ahead of time, so that's effectively a machine code compiled version of ruby code.