Does anyone know the connection between this group and Danny Hillis who created the Connection Machine a few years later (see what I did there)? Presumably they were all at MIT at about the same time.
Well, both Guy Steele and Danny Hillis were doctoral students advised by Gerry Sussman. Whether Hillis worked on the Scheme chip or how much overlap they had, I don't remember, but as you said they were all there around the same time.
In an alternate universe, we'd all be using descendants of these instead of the 8086.
Part of what killed it, besides not having the economy of scale in microprocessors, is that optimizing compilers got good at turning loops over integers into fast code for regular CPUs, and these are pretty important for overall system performance. So no matter how much faster a custom CPU could run eval, it wasn't going to be competitive at integer loops.
Had these been picked for the IBM PC, it would have died and been replaced by some RISC.
Lisp machines only made any sense in that very brief window when DRAM was faster than the CPUs that used it. Partly because of process technology, partly because of lack of understanding of CPU design principles. With x86, you could choose to ignore the parts of the design that made it slow, and just build on the basics to bring the design forward. With a lisp machine, that would have never worked.
It wouldn't have been long until you would have been able to buy machines that would have been more than 10x faster on real workloads, and probably cheaper too.
I think it's a little more than that. The Lisp machines were very expensive (though the single chip version made things like a MacIvory or MicroExplorer somewhat more affordable), very proprietary, and generally didn't run the software the mass market was looking for (not that they couldn't...there just was never a Lotus-123 or Wordstar for Symbolics). So there was probably never a path to real economy of scale.
But otherwise I think you're spot on, and it's a common arc in this industry: company comes up with a true innovation solving a problem better than the competitors, Moores law does it's thing, suddenly the COTS products are competitive through brute force if nothing else at a lower price point, and company either has to innovate again or embrace a COTS platform. Jim Gettys wrote a neat paper about how this effected high-end video cards back in the early X11 days (admittedly, no longer directly applicable since GPUs are the COTS solution now, but the principle stands).
For a somewhat more commercially successful take on this theme, there are a number of papers on the Symbolics 'Ivory' lisp processor that are worth a read. TI made a Lisp processor as well, but I'm less familiar with it.
40 points by DonHopkins on June 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree P...
Lynn Conway, co-author along with Carver Mead of "the textbook" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits:
>"Importantly, these weren’t just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 26.8 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporatio...
Part of what killed it, besides not having the economy of scale in microprocessors, is that optimizing compilers got good at turning loops over integers into fast code for regular CPUs, and these are pretty important for overall system performance. So no matter how much faster a custom CPU could run eval, it wasn't going to be competitive at integer loops.
Lisp machines only made any sense in that very brief window when DRAM was faster than the CPUs that used it. Partly because of process technology, partly because of lack of understanding of CPU design principles. With x86, you could choose to ignore the parts of the design that made it slow, and just build on the basics to bring the design forward. With a lisp machine, that would have never worked.
It wouldn't have been long until you would have been able to buy machines that would have been more than 10x faster on real workloads, and probably cheaper too.
But otherwise I think you're spot on, and it's a common arc in this industry: company comes up with a true innovation solving a problem better than the competitors, Moores law does it's thing, suddenly the COTS products are competitive through brute force if nothing else at a lower price point, and company either has to innovate again or embrace a COTS platform. Jim Gettys wrote a neat paper about how this effected high-end video cards back in the early X11 days (admittedly, no longer directly applicable since GPUs are the COTS solution now, but the principle stands).
40 points by DonHopkins on June 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Purdue Starts Comprehensive Semiconductor Degree P...
Lynn Conway, co-author along with Carver Mead of "the textbook" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits:
>"Importantly, these weren’t just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."
THE M.I.T. 1978 VLSI SYSTEM DESIGN COURSE:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.htm...
A Guidebook for the Instructor of VLSI System Design:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/InstG...
That book and course catalyzed the "Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead%E2%80%93Conway_VLSI_chip_...
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead
Lynn Conway's "Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution: How a series of failures triggered a paradigm shift in digital design":
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Memoirs/VLSI/Lynn_Co...
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964865
Here's some historic Vintage VLSI Porn that I posted 6 years ago, from Lynn Conway's famous VLSI Design course at MIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860722
DonHopkins on Jan 9, 2015 | on: Design of Lisp-Based Processors Or, LAMBDA: The Ul...
I believe this is about the Lisp Microprocessor that Guy Steele created in Lynn Conway's groundbreaking 1978 MIT VLSI System Design Course:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.html
My friend David Levitt is crouching down in this class photo so his big 1978 hair doesn't block Guy Steele's face:
The class photo is in two parts, ...
Related performance-oriented discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40296932
Lisp will always be the 'what if' watering hole in the compsci space.