6 ms·

Symbolics Sunstone Development Plan (1987) [pdf]

52 points by mepian 3y ago

gumby 3y ago
They were smoking crack. By the time this was written, regular RISC platforms were riding an economy of scale and were beating dedicated Lisp hardware, those metrics shown in the article notwithstanding. In addition: two months to a compiler? Four to a complete chip? All from a team under 15 ppl? In the 80s I programmed almost exclusively Lisp machines (CADRs, Symbolics and PARC) and the PDP-10 (also a Lisp machine) and even so I knew the market was tiny and not really growing.
- shrubble 3y ago
  They state that the chip was 50% cache memory, so possibly the speedup would come from a simple RISC plus the boost from cache. 1987 was SPARC v7 chips (v8 came out in 1990), which has 110K transistors or so depending on CPU. However the strategy of "retreat to the high end" rather than producing something in volume might have contributed to the rejection; they had no strategy for a volume system that would have gotten them more desktop / technical workstation sales.
- nxobject 3y ago
  Absolutely – Symbolics should've ditched physical hardware for a virtual machine/their port to Alpha much, much earlier than they did. Were you writing MACLISP?
  - gumby 3y ago
    Yes, I worked in MACLISP, though by the time I stared CADRs already existed.
  - lispm 3y ago
    How so? The DEC ALPHA (a 64bit CPU) appeared 1992 and Open Genera already in 1993.
    - p_l 3y ago
      My understanding is that OpenGenera started with pre-release Alpha devkits on early EV4 CPUs on very early OSF/1 builds
  - cladopa 3y ago
    I don't think so. Their hardware was the better thing. What they should have done is cannibalise themselves. Something extremely difficult, but it could be done. Fairchild did that with the integrated circuit. There was a coup inside from the people that wanted to kill the IC and stay selling expensive in small quantities instead of going to earning way less per unit en masse.
    - nxobject 3y ago
      That's an interesting possibility to think about. What do you think they could have done that involved hardware? I know Symbolics had coprocessor boards that used their existing architectures, but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window. Perhaps they could have stuck with that: I could see SGI workstations with Symbolics coprocessor boards leveraging the foothold they had in 3D graphics and animation, for example. Or a RAD development environment for technical computing on NeXT computers offloading hard symbolic computations as needed, since NeXT had high-end RAD as their selling point.
      - lispm 3y ago
        > but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window One could use a NuVista graphics board and Genera could use that directly. One could also put several UX400 / UX1200 boards into a single SUN using its VMEbus.
      - mepian 3y ago
        I've seen mentions of Symbolics working on an SGI board but I’m not sure if they ever released that. At least they released a board for another Unix workstation vendor, Sun.
        lispm 3y ago
        There was also an article mentioning a possible version for Sony News systems. On SGI it seemed that (later?) several 3d graphics applications used Allegro CL -> perhaps that was powerful enough. For Symbolics to really make sense of SGIs would have made it necessary to tap into the graphics hardware&software from the embedded Ivory boards.
- Phiwise_ 3y ago
  >In addition: two months to a compiler? Four to a complete chip? All from a team under 15 ppl? "Because of [Symbolics' automated design] methodology, we were able to do five different revs of the chip on four different technologies, which was pretty amazing [for the time]. ... We took about 10 to 12 man-years to do the Ivory chip, and the only comparable chip contemporaneous to that was the MicroVAX at DEC; I knew some people who worked on that, and their estimate was that it was 70 to 80 man-years to do the MicroVAX. That in a nutshell is the reason that the Symbolics lisp machine was great." -Kalman Reti (2012) https://youtu.be/OBfB2MJw3qg https://youtu.be/OBfB2MJw3qg Non-blub work environments bring sone fantasy-tier goals down to just within possibility by a motivated team of geniuses, which Symbolics had. Reminds me a little of how Alan Kay describes the forgotten art of Starrett erecting the empire state building in under a year: "Gentlemen, this building of yours is going to present unusual problems. Ordinary equipment won't be worth a damn on it. We'll buy and make new stuff, fitted for the job. That's what we do on every big job; it costs less than renting secondhand stuff, and it's more efficient." https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM
  - lispm 3y ago
    There is also an interesting article about TI developing the "Mega Chip", their DoD funded Lisp processor on a chip.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    > Non-blub work environments I really wish I could see old or recent time teams working in similar environments. I know mentally how they can remove all barriers to exploration and optimization but I've never seen it live. Especially compared to mainstream dev daily life where it's grind and grind and salty tears.
- phonon 3y ago
  Watch https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5690958/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5690958/ ... and x86 is a lot more challenging :-)
- thesz 3y ago
  > regular RISC platforms were riding an economy of scale I've found a fascinating page [1]. [1] https://computer.fandom.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Timeline_of_instructions_per_second https://computer.fandom.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Tim... ARM (1986) has 4 Dhrystone MIPS, and Motorola 68020 (1984, as CISC as you can get) has 4.84 Dhrystone MIPS. RISC was not riding economy of scale then, it barely existed on the periphery of the mass computing, being utilized in very expensive workstations or cheap arcade game consoles. The first significant RISC chip that made any waves was Alpha AXP 21064, when banks worldwide started to buy these in bulks. The fact that 68020 outperformed ARMv2 is what people from Syymbolics had at hand then, in 1986, writing that document.
  - kryptiskt 3y ago
    But they weren't looking at ARM, they were looking at MIPS, which handily outperformed them at the time. ARM wasn't on their radar at all, since that was an oddball UK chip not used by any of their competitors. Symbolics competed in the very expensive workstation market, their machines cost more than most in that category, so they had to keep up the performance of MIPS R2000.
    - thesz 3y ago
      MIPS (R2000) did not outdone Intel and/or Motorola at the time, those last, but not least two enjoyed all "economics of scale" of the world. MIPS was slower clock-frequency-wise than competitive offerings from Intel and/or Motorola and better pipeline design of MIPS did not add much. Complex expensive workstation like IRIS used proprietary hardware to boost I/O bandwidth and/or to have several CPUs working in parallel. It was easier for SGI to make CPUs and other hardware around them in accord and I honestly think that Symbolics was able to pull something like that.
    - simne 3y ago
      As I hear, ARM at beginning was near pure educational chip, or toy for mature boys. MIPS grown on very different soil, it was from beginning pushed by business shark. Only much later, created ARM holding and they pushed ARM architecture to mass market, but even now their behavior looking strangely lazy, as for me.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Maybe if Bill Mensch, Chuck Peddle and Sydney Anne Holt were on the team. :)
- simne 3y ago
  > two months to a compiler? Four to a complete chip? All from a team under 15 ppl? As I know, first MIPS CPU designed by exactly one engineer. Next generations designed by team. Also I know, one engineer could make Fort compiler in less than month, and I don't think core Lisp is much different from Fort. So, it is not easy to design compiler and chip by 15 ppl team in half year, but it is achievable.
varjag 3y ago
Any ideas what Ivory's "embedded applications" could have been?
- mepian 3y ago
  The Spaceborne VHSIC multiprocessor for space station environments: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19890010467/downloads/19890010467.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19890010467/downloads/19...
  - varjag 3y ago
    Great find! Also found this: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/symbolics_outlines_its_plans_and_its_hopes_for_the_new_ivory_lisp_chip https://techmonitor.ai/technology/symbolics_outlines_its_pla... It does mention military applications but by embedded they apparently meant co-hosting it in a general purpose workstation as a coprocessor.
- lispm 3y ago
  Genera embedded in Macs and SUNs, running on the MacIvory and UX boards. For example the Symbolics graphics suite was available on Macs, running on the MacIvory board and a NuVista graphics board. There were also talks to expand this to other hardware like Sony News. See also "Zora" : https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/zora/zora.html https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/zora... IIRC, that was used in an ATM switch, with network switch software running on top of Minima, "a real-time Lisp run-time environment and operating system for the Ivory processor".
  - mepian 3y ago
    The latter was designed for AT&T iirc.
    - lispm 3y ago
      Later at Lucent ported to Allegro CL and LispWorks.
pfdietz 3y ago
About this time Lucid (1984-1994) was offering their lisp, Lucid Common Lisp, which achieved good performance on stock hardware.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Followed by Energize C++, a C++ IDE based on XEmacs, with a language server, incremental compilation and code reloading, that only became common decades later. IBM had something similar with Visual Age for C++ v4, coming from the Smalltalk experience side.
phtrivier 3y ago
On a related note - it's a common concern among performance-oriented programmers that OOP, pointer-chasing, polymorphism, etc... are not adapted to modern CPU, and cause terrible performances. Has there ever been "OOP-machines" developed that would optimize / work around those problems, similar to (as I understand it) what "LISP-machines" were trying to do for LISP ?
- mepian 3y ago
  Lisp machines were object-oriented from the beginning, and their architectures included e.g. optimisations for method dispatch. There was also SOAR, “Smalltalk on a RISC” architecture specifically designed to run Smalltalk efficiently.
  - amszmidt 3y ago
    That was really not the case, there are many misconceptions about the architecture of the Lisp Machine. The CADR for example is a very simple machine, and has no knowledge of OO or methods, likewise for the Lisp Machine macrocode.
    - mepian 3y ago
      You keep pretending that the CADR is the only Lisp machine, while it’s basically a throwaway prototype for the real deal that was being implemented at Symbolics. ;) There are no misconceptions in my post. The CADR software already included Flavors, which is what I meant. The Ivory definitely had the method dispatch optimisations.
      - amszmidt 3y ago
        There was nothing "prototype" or "throwaway" about the CADR, it was heavily used at the AI lab for over 10 years, with both the Lambda and 3600 heavily based on it, to the point that the Lambda was microcode source and Lisp FASL compatible with it. The CADR "software" does not include "Flavors" -- that is part of the Lisp Machine operating system (which for a large of its life was shared between the CADR and Lambda, and even partially for the 3600 series), which is just plain Lisp and unrelated to hardware. None of TI or Symbolics machines had these type of optimisations that you mention. The Ivory did not have any special method dispatching optimisations. The Explorer was basically a Lambda.

52 points by mepian 3y ago

They were smoking crack. By the time this was written, regular RISC platforms were riding an economy of scale and were beating dedicated Lisp hardware, those metrics shown in the article notwithstanding. In addition: two months to a compiler? Four to a complete chip? All from a team under 15 ppl? In the 80s I programmed almost exclusively Lisp machines (CADRs, Symbolics and PARC) and the PDP-10 (also a Lisp machine) and even so I knew the market was tiny and not really growing.

shrubble 3y ago
They state that the chip was 50% cache memory, so possibly the speedup would come from a simple RISC plus the boost from cache. 1987 was SPARC v7 chips (v8 came out in 1990), which has 110K transistors or so depending on CPU. However the strategy of "retreat to the high end" rather than producing something in volume might have contributed to the rejection; they had no strategy for a volume system that would have gotten them more desktop / technical workstation sales.
nxobject 3y ago
Absolutely – Symbolics should've ditched physical hardware for a virtual machine/their port to Alpha much, much earlier than they did. Were you writing MACLISP?
- gumby 3y ago
  Yes, I worked in MACLISP, though by the time I stared CADRs already existed.
- lispm 3y ago
  How so? The DEC ALPHA (a 64bit CPU) appeared 1992 and Open Genera already in 1993.
  - p_l 3y ago
    My understanding is that OpenGenera started with pre-release Alpha devkits on early EV4 CPUs on very early OSF/1 builds
- cladopa 3y ago
  I don't think so. Their hardware was the better thing. What they should have done is cannibalise themselves. Something extremely difficult, but it could be done. Fairchild did that with the integrated circuit. There was a coup inside from the people that wanted to kill the IC and stay selling expensive in small quantities instead of going to earning way less per unit en masse.
  - nxobject 3y ago
    That's an interesting possibility to think about. What do you think they could have done that involved hardware? I know Symbolics had coprocessor boards that used their existing architectures, but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window. Perhaps they could have stuck with that: I could see SGI workstations with Symbolics coprocessor boards leveraging the foothold they had in 3D graphics and animation, for example. Or a RAD development environment for technical computing on NeXT computers offloading hard symbolic computations as needed, since NeXT had high-end RAD as their selling point.
    - lispm 3y ago
      > but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window One could use a NuVista graphics board and Genera could use that directly. One could also put several UX400 / UX1200 boards into a single SUN using its VMEbus.
    - mepian 3y ago
      I've seen mentions of Symbolics working on an SGI board but I’m not sure if they ever released that. At least they released a board for another Unix workstation vendor, Sun.
      - lispm 3y ago
        There was also an article mentioning a possible version for Sony News systems. On SGI it seemed that (later?) several 3d graphics applications used Allegro CL -> perhaps that was powerful enough. For Symbolics to really make sense of SGIs would have made it necessary to tap into the graphics hardware&software from the embedded Ivory boards.
Phiwise_ 3y ago
>In addition: two months to a compiler? Four to a complete chip? All from a team under 15 ppl? "Because of [Symbolics' automated design] methodology, we were able to do five different revs of the chip on four different technologies, which was pretty amazing [for the time]. ... We took about 10 to 12 man-years to do the Ivory chip, and the only comparable chip contemporaneous to that was the MicroVAX at DEC; I knew some people who worked on that, and their estimate was that it was 70 to 80 man-years to do the MicroVAX. That in a nutshell is the reason that the Symbolics lisp machine was great." -Kalman Reti (2012) https://youtu.be/OBfB2MJw3qg https://youtu.be/OBfB2MJw3qg Non-blub work environments bring sone fantasy-tier goals down to just within possibility by a motivated team of geniuses, which Symbolics had. Reminds me a little of how Alan Kay describes the forgotten art of Starrett erecting the empire state building in under a year: "Gentlemen, this building of yours is going to present unusual problems. Ordinary equipment won't be worth a damn on it. We'll buy and make new stuff, fitted for the job. That's what we do on every big job; it costs less than renting secondhand stuff, and it's more efficient." https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM
- lispm 3y ago
  There is also an interesting article about TI developing the "Mega Chip", their DoD funded Lisp processor on a chip.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  > Non-blub work environments I really wish I could see old or recent time teams working in similar environments. I know mentally how they can remove all barriers to exploration and optimization but I've never seen it live. Especially compared to mainstream dev daily life where it's grind and grind and salty tears.
phonon 3y ago
Watch https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5690958/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5690958/ ... and x86 is a lot more challenging :-)
thesz 3y ago
> regular RISC platforms were riding an economy of scale I've found a fascinating page [1]. [1] https://computer.fandom.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Timeline_of_instructions_per_second https://computer.fandom.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Tim... ARM (1986) has 4 Dhrystone MIPS, and Motorola 68020 (1984, as CISC as you can get) has 4.84 Dhrystone MIPS. RISC was not riding economy of scale then, it barely existed on the periphery of the mass computing, being utilized in very expensive workstations or cheap arcade game consoles. The first significant RISC chip that made any waves was Alpha AXP 21064, when banks worldwide started to buy these in bulks. The fact that 68020 outperformed ARMv2 is what people from Syymbolics had at hand then, in 1986, writing that document.
- kryptiskt 3y ago
  But they weren't looking at ARM, they were looking at MIPS, which handily outperformed them at the time. ARM wasn't on their radar at all, since that was an oddball UK chip not used by any of their competitors. Symbolics competed in the very expensive workstation market, their machines cost more than most in that category, so they had to keep up the performance of MIPS R2000.
  - thesz 3y ago
    MIPS (R2000) did not outdone Intel and/or Motorola at the time, those last, but not least two enjoyed all "economics of scale" of the world. MIPS was slower clock-frequency-wise than competitive offerings from Intel and/or Motorola and better pipeline design of MIPS did not add much. Complex expensive workstation like IRIS used proprietary hardware to boost I/O bandwidth and/or to have several CPUs working in parallel. It was easier for SGI to make CPUs and other hardware around them in accord and I honestly think that Symbolics was able to pull something like that.
  - simne 3y ago
    As I hear, ARM at beginning was near pure educational chip, or toy for mature boys. MIPS grown on very different soil, it was from beginning pushed by business shark. Only much later, created ARM holding and they pushed ARM architecture to mass market, but even now their behavior looking strangely lazy, as for me.
actionfromafar 3y ago
Maybe if Bill Mensch, Chuck Peddle and Sydney Anne Holt were on the team. :)
simne 3y ago
> two months to a compiler? Four to a complete chip? All from a team under 15 ppl? As I know, first MIPS CPU designed by exactly one engineer. Next generations designed by team. Also I know, one engineer could make Fort compiler in less than month, and I don't think core Lisp is much different from Fort. So, it is not easy to design compiler and chip by 15 ppl team in half year, but it is achievable.

varjag 3y ago

Any ideas what Ivory's "embedded applications" could have been?

mepian 3y ago
The Spaceborne VHSIC multiprocessor for space station environments: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19890010467/downloads/19890010467.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19890010467/downloads/19...
- varjag 3y ago
  Great find! Also found this: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/symbolics_outlines_its_plans_and_its_hopes_for_the_new_ivory_lisp_chip https://techmonitor.ai/technology/symbolics_outlines_its_pla... It does mention military applications but by embedded they apparently meant co-hosting it in a general purpose workstation as a coprocessor.
lispm 3y ago
Genera embedded in Macs and SUNs, running on the MacIvory and UX boards. For example the Symbolics graphics suite was available on Macs, running on the MacIvory board and a NuVista graphics board. There were also talks to expand this to other hardware like Sony News. See also "Zora" : https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/zora/zora.html https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/zora... IIRC, that was used in an ATM switch, with network switch software running on top of Minima, "a real-time Lisp run-time environment and operating system for the Ivory processor".
- mepian 3y ago
  The latter was designed for AT&T iirc.
  - lispm 3y ago
    Later at Lucent ported to Allegro CL and LispWorks.

pfdietz 3y ago

About this time Lucid (1984-1994) was offering their lisp, Lucid Common Lisp, which achieved good performance on stock hardware.

pjmlp 3y ago
Followed by Energize C++, a C++ IDE based on XEmacs, with a language server, incremental compilation and code reloading, that only became common decades later. IBM had something similar with Visual Age for C++ v4, coming from the Smalltalk experience side.

phtrivier 3y ago

On a related note - it's a common concern among performance-oriented programmers that OOP, pointer-chasing, polymorphism, etc... are not adapted to modern CPU, and cause terrible performances. Has there ever been "OOP-machines" developed that would optimize / work around those problems, similar to (as I understand it) what "LISP-machines" were trying to do for LISP ?

mepian 3y ago
Lisp machines were object-oriented from the beginning, and their architectures included e.g. optimisations for method dispatch. There was also SOAR, “Smalltalk on a RISC” architecture specifically designed to run Smalltalk efficiently.
- amszmidt 3y ago
  That was really not the case, there are many misconceptions about the architecture of the Lisp Machine. The CADR for example is a very simple machine, and has no knowledge of OO or methods, likewise for the Lisp Machine macrocode.
  - mepian 3y ago
    You keep pretending that the CADR is the only Lisp machine, while it’s basically a throwaway prototype for the real deal that was being implemented at Symbolics. ;) There are no misconceptions in my post. The CADR software already included Flavors, which is what I meant. The Ivory definitely had the method dispatch optimisations.
    - amszmidt 3y ago
      There was nothing "prototype" or "throwaway" about the CADR, it was heavily used at the AI lab for over 10 years, with both the Lambda and 3600 heavily based on it, to the point that the Lambda was microcode source and Lisp FASL compatible with it. The CADR "software" does not include "Flavors" -- that is part of the Lisp Machine operating system (which for a large of its life was shared between the CADR and Lambda, and even partially for the 3600 series), which is just plain Lisp and unrelated to hardware. None of TI or Symbolics machines had these type of optimisations that you mention. The Ivory did not have any special method dispatching optimisations. The Explorer was basically a Lambda.