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A comment on Architecture of Lisp Machines (2008) [pdf]. Parent comment

Re:Architecture of Lisp Machines (2008) [pdf] by peter303 on Friday July 02, 2021 @03:58PM (#27716086)
Special purpose CPUs ran faster than general purpose. However they had upgrade cycles of 3-5 years compared 1/2 to 1 year for commodity chips. The commodity chip almost always caught up in the meantime at a lower cost. My research group bought array processors, fine grained processor like MassPar and Thinking Machines, min-super computers like Convex, and this catch-up happened every time. LISP firmware on general CPUs caught up with custom hardware like Symbolics too.

Very large customer bases like Nvidia can have annual design releases and keep up.

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Re:Architecture of Lisp Machines (2008) [pdf] by zozbot234 on Friday July 02, 2021 @04:27PM (#27716466)
> The commodity chip almost always caught up in the meantime at a lower cost.

This dynamic is dead now, thanks to the slowing down of Moore's Law. We're even seeing a resurgence of special-purpose hardwired accelerators in CPU's, because "dark silicon" (i.e. the practical death of Dennard scaling) opens up a lot of opportunity for hardware blocks that are only powered up rarely in a typical workload. That's not too different from what the Lisp machines did.

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Re:Architecture of Lisp Machines (2008) [pdf] by formerly_proven on Saturday July 03, 2021 @04:58AM (#27720304)
Seems to me like Lisp was the OG "bloat language" (cf. Python, Ruby, ... today).
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