Design of Lisp-based Processors (1979)

Re:Design of Lisp-based Processors (1979) by noahl on Sunday February 17, 2013 @07:44PM (#5237479)

This is very interesting. I always thought that making an ASIC was prohibitively expensive except for the largest companies. How much does it really cost?

I would really enjoy playing with a Lisp chip. It might not be good for performance computing, but it would be great for writing GUIs. The paper suggests having a chip with a Lisp part for control and an APL part for array processing - I think the modern equivalent would be a typed-dispatching part for control and some CUDA or OpenCL cores for speed.

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Re:Design of Lisp-based Processors (1979) by gatherknwldg on Sunday February 17, 2013 @08:19PM (#5237564)

> I always thought that making an ASIC was prohibitively expensive except for the largest companies. How much does it really cost?

Full custom is still quite expensive.

But you can go the route I'm talking about (prototype on an FPGA, then get in on one of the standard runs at a chip fab via MOSIS or CMP or a similar service) for ~10,000 USD for a handful of chips.

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Re:Design of Lisp-based Processors (1979) by defrost on Sunday February 17, 2013 @08:56PM (#5237696)

I'm sensing some kind of universal price point for bleeding edge fabrication.

Adjusting for time, etc. that's pretty what in cost in 1991 to have a handful of custom boards and firmware built about the TI DSP chips of the day in order build a dedicated multichannel parallel siesmic signal processing array for marine survey work.

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