With modern hardware, I think it's not entirely obvious that specialized Lisp hardware would be a significant win. It's possible it would be, but not in the cla

With modern hardware, I think it's not entirely obvious that specialized Lisp hardware would be a significant win. It's possible it would be, but not in the classic CISC-style approach of just baking important Lisp primitives into the instruction set. Without more, that would in practice just be implemented the way x86 is, translating the CISC-style instructions to RISC-style micro-ops, with no huge change to the basic CPU architecture. A more interesting question is whether significant architecture change would better suit some language paradigms. There was an interesting series of posts on possibilities in that direction at Yosef K's blog: http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html http://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html http://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html