Re: time to bring back the Lisp machines?
- From: "John Thingstad" <john.thingstad@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 16:08:46 +0200
On Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:08:52 +0200, Mark Tarver <dr.mtarver@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Fast forward now to 2006 and things look very different.
We've not seen much improvement in processor speed
since 2003. Intel's Prescott chip turned out to be the
world's most expensive toaster. Hence the factor that
killed off the LMs is now out of play. So is anybody out
there considering that LMs might have some future in
today's market?
Mark
Maybe..
I just got a new machine here on friday.
It is has a intel Pentiom D 840 HT (dual core) chip.
You are quite wrong that the systems are not much faster.
Belive me this one is bloody fast..
Memory read in paralell (DDR2). (2 Gb in 4 512 Mb banks/533MHz DDR2 PC3200)
Chip runs two threads in paralell. Two 160 Gb disks run in paralell
(SATA RAID 0 Striped.. SATA has a max of 3 Gb/s transfer rate).
Also a seperate graphics processor (NVidia GForce 7300SL TurboCache)
on a PCI express 16x port.. (twice the transfer rate of ATA)
It's not just the chip but everything else surrounding it.
(Whatchout for RAID 0. It doubles the chance of failure and some programs
mainly scandisk and defrag can cause the whole system to fail so
a reformat is neccesary. Also Raid 0 on one motherboard will not work with RAID 0
on another type. I back up on a extenal 360Gb drive using a firewire
800 (or IEEE 1394b) connector (manages transfer rates of 62 Mb/s).
We do have a new teckology in the 900 series from Intel.
It uses 65 nm lithography as opposed to 90 nm.
What I do see is that clock frequencies are unlikly to go
much above 3 GHz. (heat problems)
What does seem to be the trend is to put more and more spesialized hardware on the chip.
MX SSE/2/3 Viiv etc.. So yes spesializing a chip for Lisp might perhaps be interesting.
My main reservation is that I am not sure it is neccesary.
The Lisp community is still pretty small.
Current compilers do pretty well on current system easily competing with
Java in some areas. With Microsoft also moving to 'managed code'/.NET
I dont think speed seems to be a top priority.
Back in the 80's things looked different.
Lisp required memory diskspace and processing well in excess of the current hardware.
Now speed or capasity is not a problem. Do enough people need/want it?
If so I am sure it can be done.
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