4 ms·

Design of the SCHEME-78 Lisp-based microprocessor (1980)

114 points by fanf2 1y ago

unwind 1y ago
Meta: This could use a "(1980)" tag in the title. The "-78" is a hint, of course.
- tlb 1y ago
  Added, thanks
le-mark 1y ago
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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporatio...
- EdwardCoffin 1y ago
  I know that Guy Steele joined Thinking Machines, but after they'd at least designed the CM-1. He talked a little about it in A Conversation with Guy Steele Jr. in the April 2005 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. I don't have a link, but I am sure he has talked about it elsewhere too.
  - rjsw 1y ago
    He also worked for Tartan Laboratories [1] at one point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartan_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartan_Laboratories
- kkylin 1y ago
  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.
tlb 1y ago
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.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > In an alternate universe, we'd all be using descendants of these instead of the 8086. Unlikely. For this to happen, the developers would have had to target the mass market (i.e. working hard to make the processor and a computer based on it rather cheaply available for the masses). This is clearly not what SCHEME-78 was developed for.
- CyberDildonics 1y ago
  Programmers may have wanted to program in other languages but users wanted speed. People were already buying computers that cost more than cars and they ran like molasses. You have to deliver what customers want on their terms, not program on your own terms.
  - kjs3 1y ago
    users wanted speed I'd argue users wanted off the shelf software, not bespoke solutions, which is why they were cool with slow machines that ran 123, dBase and Wordperfect.
    - CyberDildonics 1y ago
      I don't know what you're trying to say here, all those programs would have run terribly if they were written in lisp or scheme.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        Compiled languages with automatic memory management were already a thing in 16 bit home computers, and they run fast enough for boring data entry business software, e.g. anything xBASE, compiled BASIC. Anything to do with graphics and games, yes only Assembly would do the trick.
kjs3 1y ago
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.
- pinewurst 1y ago
  I have to assume that the TI Lisp chip was effectively just a CADR-on-a-chip (actually Lambda-on-a-chip) rather than a new architecture, necessary to support their software base.
  - rjsw 1y ago
    It has some extra hardware to do type checking in parallel with numeric instructions [1]. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1317224.1317226 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1317224.1317226
    - kragen 1y ago
      Oh, the CADR didn't?
      - amszmidt 1y ago
        Correct, neither did the Lambda. The article though references the Explorer II, a later version of the Explorer I ("Lambda").
  - p_l 1y ago
    Major difference between Lambda and TI machines was a switch from 24bit fixnum (and addressing) to 25bit fixnums (and address)
    - rjsw 1y ago
      You could run 25bit images and microcode on any of the CADR/Lambda/TI machines.
DonHopkins 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31758139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31758139 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.html 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/InstGuide.html 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_design_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead%E2%80%93Conway_VLSI_chip_... https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead 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_Conway_VLSI_Reminiscences.pdf https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Memoirs/VLSI/Lynn_Co... Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964865 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860722 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 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, left and right: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class2s.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class2s.jp... http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class3s.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class3s.jp... Here are hires images of the two halves of the chip the class made: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78chip%20photo-1%20L.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c... http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78chip%20photo-2%20L.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c... The Great Quux's Lisp Microprocessor is the big one on the left of the second image, and you can see his name "(C) 1978 GUY L STEELE JR" if you zoom in. David's project is in the lower right corner of the first image, and you can see his name "LEVITT" if you zoom way in. Here is a photo of a chalkboard with status of the various projects: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Status%20Em.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Status%20E... The final sanity check before maskmaking: A wall-sized overall check plot made at Xerox PARC from Arpanet-transmitted design files, showing the student design projects merged into multiproject chip set. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Checkplot%20s.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Checkplot%... One of the wafers just off the HP fab line containing the MIT'78 VLSI design projects: Wafers were then diced into chips, and the chips packaged and wire bonded to specific projects, which were then tested back at M.I.T. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Wafer%20s.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Wafer%20s.... Design of a LISP-based microprocessor http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359031 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359031 ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-514.pdf Page 22 has a map of the processor layout: http://i.imgur.com/zwaJMQC.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zwaJMQC.jpg We present a design for a class of computers whose “instruction sets” are based on LISP. LISP, like traditional stored-program machine languages and unlike most high-level languages, conceptually stores programs and data in the same way and explicitly allows programs to be manipulated as data, and so is a suitable basis for a stored-program computer architecture. LISP differs from traditional machine languages in that the program/data storage is conceptually an unordered set of linked record structures of various sizes, rather than an ordered, indexable vector of integers or bit fields of fixed size. An instruction set can be designed for programs expressed as trees of record structures. A processor can interpret these program trees in a recursive fashion and provide automatic storage management for the record structures. We discuss a small-scale prototype VLSI microprocessor which has been designed and fabricated, containing a sufficiently complete instruction interpreter to execute small programs and a rudimentary storage allocator. Here's a map of the projects on that chip, and a list of the people who made them and what they did: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp... 1. Sandra Azoury, N. Lynn Bowen Jorge Rubenstein: Charge flow transistors (moisture sensors) integrated into digital subsystem for testing. 2. Andy Boughton, J. Dean Brock, Randy Bryant, Clement Leung: Serial data manipulator subsystem for searching and sorting data base operations. 3. Jim Cherry: Graphics memory subsystem for mirroring/rotating image data. 4. Mike Coln: Switched capacitor, serial quantizing D/A converter. 5. Steve Frank: Writeable PLA project, based on the 3-transistor ram cell. 6. Jim Frankel: Data path portion of a bit-slice microprocessor. 7. Nelson Goldikener, Scott Westbrook: Electrical test patterns for chip set. 8. Tak Hiratsuka: Subsystem for data base operations. 9. Siu Ho Lam: Autocorrelator subsystem. 10. Dave Levitt: Synchronously timed FIFO. 11. Craig Olson: Bus interface for 7-segment display data. 12. Dave Otten: Bus interfaceable real time clock/calendar. 13. Ernesto Perea: 4-Bit slice microprogram sequencer. 14. Gerald Roylance: LRU virtual memory paging subsystem. 15. Dave Shaver Multi-function smart memory. 16. Alan Snyder Associative memory. 17. Guy Steele: LISP microprocessor (LISP expression evaluator and associated memory manager; operates directly on LISP expressions stored in memory). 18. Richard Stern: Finite impulse response digital filter. 19. Runchan Yang: Armstrong type bubble sorting memory. The following projects were completed but not quite in time for inclusion in the project set: 20. Sandra Azoury, N. Lynn Bowen, Jorge Rubenstein: In addition to project 1 above, this team completed a CRT controller project. 21. Martin Fraeman: Programmable interval clock. 22. Bob Baldwin: LCS net nametable project. 23. Moshe Bain: Programmable word generator. 24. Rae McLellan: Chaos net address matcher. 25. Robert Reynolds: Digital Subsystem to be used with project 4. Also, Jim Clark (SGI, Netscape) was one of Lynn Conway's students, and she taught him how to make his first prototype "Geometry Engine"! http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/MPCAdv.html http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/MPCAdv.ht... Just 29 days after the design deadline time at the end of the courses, packaged custom wire-bonded chips were shipped back to all the MPC79 designers. Many of these worked as planned, and the overall activity was a great success. I'll now project photos of several interesting MPC79 projects. First is one of the multiproject chips produced by students and faculty researchers at Stanford University (Fig. 5). Among these is the first prototype of the "Geometry Engine", a high performance computer graphics image-generation system, designed by Jim Clark. That project has since evolved into a very interesting architectural exploration and development project.[9] Figure 5. Photo of MPC79 Die-Type BK (containing projects from Stanford University): http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp... [...] The text itself passed through drafts, became a manuscript, went on to become a published text. Design environments evolved from primitive CIF editors and CIF plotting software on to include all sorts of advanced symbolic layout generators and analysis aids. Some new architectural paradigms have begun to similarly evolve. An example is the series of designs produced by the OM project here at Caltech. At MIT there has been the work on evolving the LISP microprocessors [3,10]. At Stanford, Jim Clark's prototype geometry engine, done as a project for MPC79, has gone on to become the basis of a very powerful graphics processing system architecture [9], involving a later iteration of his prototype plus new work by Marc Hannah on an image memory processor [20]. [...] For example, the early circuit extractor work done by Clark Baker [16] at MIT became very widely known because Clark made access to the program available to a number of people in the network community. From Clark's viewpoint, this further tested the program and validated the concepts involved. But Clark's use of the network made many, many people aware of what the concept was about. The extractor proved so useful that knowledge about it propagated very rapidly through the community. (Another factor may have been the clever and often bizarre error-messages that Clark's program generated when it found an error in a user's design!) 9. J. Clark, "A VLSI Geometry Processor for Graphics", Computer, Vol. 13, No. 7, July, 1980. [...] The above is all from Lynn Conway's fascinating web site, which includes her great book "VLSI Reminiscence" available for free: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ These photos look very beautiful to me, and it's interesting to scroll around the hires image of the Quux's Lisp Microprocessor while looking at the map from page 22 that I linked to above. There really isn't that much too it, so even though it's the biggest one, it really isn't all that complicated, so I'd say that "SIMPLE" graffiti is not totally inappropriate. (It's microcoded, and you can actually see the rough but semi-regular "texture" of the code!) This paper has lots more beautiful Vintage VLSI Porn, if you're into that kind of stuff like I am: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPC79/Photos/PDFs/MPC79ChipPhotos.pdf http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPC79/Photos/PDF... A full color hires image of the chip including James Clark's Geometry Engine is on page 23, model "MPC79BK", upside down in the upper right corner, "Geometry Engine (C) 1979 James Clark", with a close-up "centerfold spread" on page 27. Is the "document chip" on page 20, model "MPC79AH", a hardware implementation of Literate Programming? If somebody catches you looking at page 27, you can quickly flip to page 20, and tell them that you only look at Vintage VLSI Porn Magazines for the articles! There is quite literally a Playboy Bunny logo on page 21, model "MPC79B1", so who knows what else you might find in there by zooming in and scrolling around stuff like the "infamous buffalo chip"? http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIarchive.html http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIarchive.html http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSI.archive.spreadsheet.htm http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSI.archive.spr...
x-complexity 1y ago
Mandatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/297/ https://xkcd.com/297/ Related performance-oriented discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40296932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40296932 Lisp will always be the 'what if' watering hole in the compsci space.

114 points by fanf2 1y ago

unwind 1y ago

Meta: This could use a "(1980)" tag in the title. The "-78" is a hint, of course.

tlb 1y ago
Added, thanks

le-mark 1y ago

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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporatio...

EdwardCoffin 1y ago
I know that Guy Steele joined Thinking Machines, but after they'd at least designed the CM-1. He talked a little about it in A Conversation with Guy Steele Jr. in the April 2005 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. I don't have a link, but I am sure he has talked about it elsewhere too.
- rjsw 1y ago
  He also worked for Tartan Laboratories [1] at one point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartan_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartan_Laboratories
kkylin 1y ago
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.

tlb 1y ago

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.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> In an alternate universe, we'd all be using descendants of these instead of the 8086. Unlikely. For this to happen, the developers would have had to target the mass market (i.e. working hard to make the processor and a computer based on it rather cheaply available for the masses). This is clearly not what SCHEME-78 was developed for.
CyberDildonics 1y ago
Programmers may have wanted to program in other languages but users wanted speed. People were already buying computers that cost more than cars and they ran like molasses. You have to deliver what customers want on their terms, not program on your own terms.
- kjs3 1y ago
  users wanted speed I'd argue users wanted off the shelf software, not bespoke solutions, which is why they were cool with slow machines that ran 123, dBase and Wordperfect.
  - CyberDildonics 1y ago
    I don't know what you're trying to say here, all those programs would have run terribly if they were written in lisp or scheme.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Compiled languages with automatic memory management were already a thing in 16 bit home computers, and they run fast enough for boring data entry business software, e.g. anything xBASE, compiled BASIC. Anything to do with graphics and games, yes only Assembly would do the trick.

kjs3 1y ago

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.

pinewurst 1y ago
I have to assume that the TI Lisp chip was effectively just a CADR-on-a-chip (actually Lambda-on-a-chip) rather than a new architecture, necessary to support their software base.
- rjsw 1y ago
  It has some extra hardware to do type checking in parallel with numeric instructions [1]. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1317224.1317226 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1317224.1317226
  - kragen 1y ago
    Oh, the CADR didn't?
    - amszmidt 1y ago
      Correct, neither did the Lambda. The article though references the Explorer II, a later version of the Explorer I ("Lambda").
- p_l 1y ago
  Major difference between Lambda and TI machines was a switch from 24bit fixnum (and addressing) to 25bit fixnums (and address)
  - rjsw 1y ago
    You could run 25bit images and microcode on any of the CADR/Lambda/TI machines.

DonHopkins 1y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31758139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31758139 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.html 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/InstGuide.html 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_design_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead%E2%80%93Conway_VLSI_chip_... https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead 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_Conway_VLSI_Reminiscences.pdf https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Memoirs/VLSI/Lynn_Co... Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964865 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860722 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 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, left and right: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class2s.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class2s.jp... http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class3s.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Class3s.jp... Here are hires images of the two halves of the chip the class made: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78chip%20photo-1%20L.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c... http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78chip%20photo-2%20L.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/MIT78c... The Great Quux's Lisp Microprocessor is the big one on the left of the second image, and you can see his name "(C) 1978 GUY L STEELE JR" if you zoom in. David's project is in the lower right corner of the first image, and you can see his name "LEVITT" if you zoom way in. Here is a photo of a chalkboard with status of the various projects: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Status%20Em.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Status%20E... The final sanity check before maskmaking: A wall-sized overall check plot made at Xerox PARC from Arpanet-transmitted design files, showing the student design projects merged into multiproject chip set. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Checkplot%20s.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Checkplot%... One of the wafers just off the HP fab line containing the MIT'78 VLSI design projects: Wafers were then diced into chips, and the chips packaged and wire bonded to specific projects, which were then tested back at M.I.T. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Wafer%20s.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/Wafer%20s.... Design of a LISP-based microprocessor http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359031 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359031 ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-514.pdf Page 22 has a map of the processor layout: http://i.imgur.com/zwaJMQC.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zwaJMQC.jpg We present a design for a class of computers whose “instruction sets” are based on LISP. LISP, like traditional stored-program machine languages and unlike most high-level languages, conceptually stores programs and data in the same way and explicitly allows programs to be manipulated as data, and so is a suitable basis for a stored-program computer architecture. LISP differs from traditional machine languages in that the program/data storage is conceptually an unordered set of linked record structures of various sizes, rather than an ordered, indexable vector of integers or bit fields of fixed size. An instruction set can be designed for programs expressed as trees of record structures. A processor can interpret these program trees in a recursive fashion and provide automatic storage management for the record structures. We discuss a small-scale prototype VLSI microprocessor which has been designed and fabricated, containing a sufficiently complete instruction interpreter to execute small programs and a rudimentary storage allocator. Here's a map of the projects on that chip, and a list of the people who made them and what they did: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp... 1. Sandra Azoury, N. Lynn Bowen Jorge Rubenstein: Charge flow transistors (moisture sensors) integrated into digital subsystem for testing. 2. Andy Boughton, J. Dean Brock, Randy Bryant, Clement Leung: Serial data manipulator subsystem for searching and sorting data base operations. 3. Jim Cherry: Graphics memory subsystem for mirroring/rotating image data. 4. Mike Coln: Switched capacitor, serial quantizing D/A converter. 5. Steve Frank: Writeable PLA project, based on the 3-transistor ram cell. 6. Jim Frankel: Data path portion of a bit-slice microprocessor. 7. Nelson Goldikener, Scott Westbrook: Electrical test patterns for chip set. 8. Tak Hiratsuka: Subsystem for data base operations. 9. Siu Ho Lam: Autocorrelator subsystem. 10. Dave Levitt: Synchronously timed FIFO. 11. Craig Olson: Bus interface for 7-segment display data. 12. Dave Otten: Bus interfaceable real time clock/calendar. 13. Ernesto Perea: 4-Bit slice microprogram sequencer. 14. Gerald Roylance: LRU virtual memory paging subsystem. 15. Dave Shaver Multi-function smart memory. 16. Alan Snyder Associative memory. 17. Guy Steele: LISP microprocessor (LISP expression evaluator and associated memory manager; operates directly on LISP expressions stored in memory). 18. Richard Stern: Finite impulse response digital filter. 19. Runchan Yang: Armstrong type bubble sorting memory. The following projects were completed but not quite in time for inclusion in the project set: 20. Sandra Azoury, N. Lynn Bowen, Jorge Rubenstein: In addition to project 1 above, this team completed a CRT controller project. 21. Martin Fraeman: Programmable interval clock. 22. Bob Baldwin: LCS net nametable project. 23. Moshe Bain: Programmable word generator. 24. Rae McLellan: Chaos net address matcher. 25. Robert Reynolds: Digital Subsystem to be used with project 4. Also, Jim Clark (SGI, Netscape) was one of Lynn Conway's students, and she taught him how to make his first prototype "Geometry Engine"! http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/MPCAdv.html http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/MPCAdv.ht... Just 29 days after the design deadline time at the end of the courses, packaged custom wire-bonded chips were shipped back to all the MPC79 designers. Many of these worked as planned, and the overall activity was a great success. I'll now project photos of several interesting MPC79 projects. First is one of the multiproject chips produced by students and faculty researchers at Stanford University (Fig. 5). Among these is the first prototype of the "Geometry Engine", a high performance computer graphics image-generation system, designed by Jim Clark. That project has since evolved into a very interesting architectural exploration and development project.[9] Figure 5. Photo of MPC79 Die-Type BK (containing projects from Stanford University): http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jpg http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp... [...] The text itself passed through drafts, became a manuscript, went on to become a published text. Design environments evolved from primitive CIF editors and CIF plotting software on to include all sorts of advanced symbolic layout generators and analysis aids. Some new architectural paradigms have begun to similarly evolve. An example is the series of designs produced by the OM project here at Caltech. At MIT there has been the work on evolving the LISP microprocessors [3,10]. At Stanford, Jim Clark's prototype geometry engine, done as a project for MPC79, has gone on to become the basis of a very powerful graphics processing system architecture [9], involving a later iteration of his prototype plus new work by Marc Hannah on an image memory processor [20]. [...] For example, the early circuit extractor work done by Clark Baker [16] at MIT became very widely known because Clark made access to the program available to a number of people in the network community. From Clark's viewpoint, this further tested the program and validated the concepts involved. But Clark's use of the network made many, many people aware of what the concept was about. The extractor proved so useful that knowledge about it propagated very rapidly through the community. (Another factor may have been the clever and often bizarre error-messages that Clark's program generated when it found an error in a user's design!) 9. J. Clark, "A VLSI Geometry Processor for Graphics", Computer, Vol. 13, No. 7, July, 1980. [...] The above is all from Lynn Conway's fascinating web site, which includes her great book "VLSI Reminiscence" available for free: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ These photos look very beautiful to me, and it's interesting to scroll around the hires image of the Quux's Lisp Microprocessor while looking at the map from page 22 that I linked to above. There really isn't that much too it, so even though it's the biggest one, it really isn't all that complicated, so I'd say that "SIMPLE" graffiti is not totally inappropriate. (It's microcoded, and you can actually see the rough but semi-regular "texture" of the code!) This paper has lots more beautiful Vintage VLSI Porn, if you're into that kind of stuff like I am: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPC79/Photos/PDFs/MPC79ChipPhotos.pdf http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPC79/Photos/PDF... A full color hires image of the chip including James Clark's Geometry Engine is on page 23, model "MPC79BK", upside down in the upper right corner, "Geometry Engine (C) 1979 James Clark", with a close-up "centerfold spread" on page 27. Is the "document chip" on page 20, model "MPC79AH", a hardware implementation of Literate Programming? If somebody catches you looking at page 27, you can quickly flip to page 20, and tell them that you only look at Vintage VLSI Porn Magazines for the articles! There is quite literally a Playboy Bunny logo on page 21, model "MPC79B1", so who knows what else you might find in there by zooming in and scrolling around stuff like the "infamous buffalo chip"? http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIarchive.html http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSIarchive.html http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSI.archive.spreadsheet.htm http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/VLSI.archive.spr...

x-complexity 1y ago

Mandatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/297/ https://xkcd.com/297/ Related performance-oriented discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40296932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40296932 Lisp will always be the 'what if' watering hole in the compsci space.