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The lost cause of the Lisp machines

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Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#161

Post by vrighter »

layer8 wrote: post #135
hajile wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be very real differences between x86 and ARM not only in the designs they make easy, but also in the difficulty of making higher-performance designs. It's telling that ARM, Apple, and Qualcomm have all shipped designs that are physically smaller, faster, and consume way less power vs AMD and Intel. Even ARM's medium cores have had higher IPC than same-generation x86 big cores since at least A78. SiFive'…

How does that square with the fact that there is no dramatic performance loss for x86 emulation on ARM?

But only on Apple ARM implementations which have specific hardware built into the chip to do so (emulate the memory model), which won't be available in the future because they're dropping rosetta2..

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#162

Post by branko_d »

layer8 wrote: post #135
hajile wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be very real differences between x86 and ARM not only in the designs they make easy, but also in the difficulty of making higher-performance designs. It's telling that ARM, Apple, and Qualcomm have all shipped designs that are physically smaller, faster, and consume way less power vs AMD and Intel. Even ARM's medium cores have had higher IPC than same-generation x86 big cores since at least A78. SiFive'…

How does that square with the fact that there is no dramatic performance loss for x86 emulation on ARM?

Probably because must “emulation” is more like “transpilation” these days - there is a hit up front to translate into native instructions, but they are then cached and repeatedly executed like any other native instructions.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#163

Post by vrighter »

larsbrinkhoff wrote: post #17
karlgkk wrote: post #4

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.” What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

See also: Amiga romantics. 8-bit romantics. PDP-10 romantics. Let them stay. Let them romantizice.

All of those are systems small enough that all their details could fit inside one human brain. That is a very intoxicating feeling, at least for me.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#165

Post by toasterlovin »

hajile wrote: post #109
Validark wrote: post #59

I liked the article, but I found the random remark about RISC vs CISC to be very similar to what the author is complaining about. The difference between the Apple M series and AMD's Zen series is NOT a RISC vs CISC issue. In fact, many would argue it's fair to say that ARM is not RISC and x86-64 is not CISC. These terms were used to refer to machines vastly different from what we have today, and the RISC vs CISC deba…

There seem to be very real differences between x86 and ARM not only in the designs they make easy, but also in the difficulty of making higher-performance designs. It's telling that ARM, Apple, and Qualcomm have all shipped designs that are physically smaller, faster, and consume way less power vs AMD and Intel. Even ARM's medium cores have had higher IPC than same-generation x86 big cores since at least A78. SiFive'…

> It's telling that ARM, Apple, and Qualcomm have all shipped designs that are physically smaller, faster, and consume way less power vs AMD and Intel.

These companies target different workloads. ARM, Apple, and Qualcomm are all making processors primarily designed to be run in low power applications like cell phones or laptops, whereas Intel and AMD are designing processors for servers and desktops.

> x86 is quickly becoming dead last which should be possible if ISA doesn't matter at all given AMD and Intel's budgets (AMD for example spends more in R&D than ARM's entire gross revenue).

My napkin math is that Apple’s transistor volumes are roughly comparable to the entire PC market combined, and they’re doing most of that on TSMC’s latest node. So at this point, I think it’s actually the ARM ecosystem that has the larger R&D budget.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#166

Post by whstl »

iLemming wrote: post #141
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not hard. It's just annoying to deal with this shit on constant basis. Like just the other day, the tests wouldn't pass locally, while they're passing on CI. I was scratching my head for sometime, turns out there was breaking change in csv.QUOTE_STRINGS or something, between 3.12 and 3.13 of Python. How the fuck did they manage to fix/improve fucking csv logic introducing a breaking change?

I'm always suspicious of people who go "this is easy" as a way to put others down.

...especially when it's about problems that are universally accepted as not being trivial, and often require entire teams and ecosystems (Docker, Poetry, uv) to solve in scale.

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#168

Post by smm11 »

larsbrinkhoff wrote: post #17
karlgkk wrote: post #4

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.” What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

See also: Amiga romantics. 8-bit romantics. PDP-10 romantics. Let them stay. Let them romantizice.

OpenDoc

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#169

Post by hajile »

vrighter wrote: post #161
layer8 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that square with the fact that there is no dramatic performance loss for x86 emulation on ARM?

But only on Apple ARM implementations which have specific hardware built into the chip to do so (emulate the memory model), which won't be available in the future because they're dropping rosetta2..

Apple isn't dropping Rosetta 2. They say quite clearly that it's sticking around indefinitely for older applications and games.

It seems to me that Apple is simply going to require native ARM versions of new software if you want it to be signed and verified by them (which seems pretty reasonably after 5+ years).

Re: The lost cause of the Lisp machines

#170

Post by hajile »

toasterlovin wrote: post #165
hajile wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be very real differences between x86 and ARM not only in the designs they make easy, but also in the difficulty of making higher-performance designs. It's telling that ARM, Apple, and Qualcomm have all shipped designs that are physically smaller, faster, and consume way less power vs AMD and Intel. Even ARM's medium cores have had higher IPC than same-generation x86 big cores since at least A78. SiFive'…

> It's telling that ARM, Apple, and Qualcomm have all shipped designs that are physically smaller, faster, and consume way less power vs AMD and Intel. These companies target different workloads. ARM, Apple, and Qualcomm are all making processors primarily designed to be run in low power applications like cell phones or laptops, whereas Intel and AMD are designing processors for servers and desktops. > x86 is quickly…

> These companies target different workloads.

This hasn't been true for at least half of a decade.

The latest generation of phone chips run from 4.2GHz all the way up to 4.6GHz with even just a single core using 12-16 watts of power and multi-core hitting over 20w.

Those cores are designed for desktops and happen to work in phones, but the smaller, energy-efficient M-cores and E-cores still dominate in phones because they can't keep up with the P-cores.

ARM's Neoverse cores are mostly just their normal P-cores with more validation and certification. Nuvia (designers of Qualcomm's cores) was founded because the M-series designers wanted to make a server-specific chip and Apple wasn't interested. Apple themselves have made mind-blowingly huge chips for their Max/Ultra designs.

"x86 cores are worse because they are server-grade" just isn't a valid rebuttal. A phone is much more constrained than a watercooled server in a datacenter. ARM chips are faster and consume less power and use less die area.

> So at this point, I think it’s actually the ARM ecosystem that has the larger R&D budget.

Apple doesn't design ARM's chips and we know ARM's peak revenue and their R&D spending. ARM pumps out several times more cores per year along with every other thing you would need to make a chip (and they announced they are actually making their own server chips). ARM does this with an R&D budget that is a small fraction of AMD's budget to do the same thing.

What is AMD's excuse? Either everybody at AMD and Intel suck or all the extra work to make x86 fast (and validating all the weirdness around it) is a ball and chain slowing them down.

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