What is the current state of lisp specific hardware, either lisp machines or
lisp on a chip boards? Does any vendor still make these? Where might such
hardware be purchased and at what cost? Is there a market for used lisp
hardware?
Have the PC and Macintosh software lisp environments passed the lisp specific
hardware systems in terms of price v. performance or features in general?
I have read the faq for this newsgroup and was hoping for more detailed
information.
Thanks in advance.
-- Rich Robbins
In article <··········@nntp.interaccess.com>, ···@interaccess.com (Richard
E. Robbins) wrote:
> What is the current state of lisp specific hardware, either lisp machines or
> lisp on a chip boards?
Mostly dead. No development (atleast I'm not aware of one)
of a processor with support for something like Lisp (Prolog,
SmallTalk) is taking place.
I wouldn't count the seven (!) Alpha processor "Object Supercomputer"
machine from IBEX (http://www.ibex.ch/) as Lisp specific hardware.
Although it seems to be built for running a distributed
object-oriented Lisp-based database (ITASCA).
In the latest ix (a german computer magazine) there
was a photo of this beast. Costs **huge** amounts of money,
has a cool red case and is small enough to fit under a table.
64bit processors like the DEC Alpha are quite nice
for implementing Lisp systems (tags!). You can get
Genera (the Lisp machine system) based on an Ivory emulation
running on DEC Alpha from Symbolics. The emulation is
faster than any Ivory hardware that has been built.
Still, reimplementing an Ivory chip with current chip
technology would result in a very fast machine.
Another alternative would be a native code compiler for
Lisp and some way to make Genera the default OS
(getting rid of DEC's OSF/1). But Santa Clos ;-) hasn't
accepted my wishlist, yet.
> Does any vendor still make these? Where might such
> hardware be purchased and at what cost? Is there a market for used lisp
> hardware?
Symbolics is still alive and they would be happy to hear from
you. There are some used machines available (Xerox, TI and
Symbolics machines). The most attractive are the Nubus-boards
for the Mac from TI and Symbolics (IMHO), because they are quite
small and are not so power hungry as the standalone machines.
Watch out for postings on comp.sys.ti.explorer or info.slug .
> Have the PC and Macintosh software lisp environments passed the lisp specific
> hardware systems in terms of price v. performance
Well, native compilers on really fast machines (like UltraSPARC
or DEC Alpha) are, well, really fast. Much faster than
the old Lisp machines.
To give you an example, I would compare an Ivory 3 machine roughly
to a 40 Mhz 68030. But since there are some architectural
advantages on the Ivory side (for example the 40 Bit architecture)
and a clever implementation and integration of Lisp and
the Lisp-based OS (you don't need to convert data from
the underlying OS to the Lisp data format), it feels faster
for real world applications than the 68030.
> or features in general?
Here we have a tough question.
Is a design from ten (and more) years ago still unmatched? ... Hmm ...
Well, sadly, for *some* stuff these machines are still ahead of
time.
For some more information look for the "Online Symbolics Museum".
Rainer Joswig