I've heard a few people suggest that with single core performance stagnating we may see more ASICs. I admit I'm skeptical, but this line of development does seem worth exploring.
Announcing PilMCU, the Lisp Machine on a Chip
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Re: Announcing PilMCU, the Lisp Machine on a Chip
#32Yes, it can be done, but the half-dozen or so LISP machines of the 1980s were not very successful. Price/performance was worse than compiled LISP on common CPUs.
There's no indication of hardware support for garbage collection. It would probably be more useful to have tag bits to support GC than a LISP-oriented instruction set, especially if it allowed concurrent GC.
Re: Announcing PilMCU, the Lisp Machine on a Chip
#33Re: Announcing PilMCU, the Lisp Machine on a Chip
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been told that TI have given formal permission to redistribute their code, I will chase up the person who got hold of it to get it properly labelled. The LMI stuff is more interesting to me as it is complete, I'm still a fair bit of work away from being able to build it though. I have spoken with RG about it but we didn't discuss the licence.
Texas Instruments sold their computer systems division at the start of the 1990s. I've read that that sale did not include the Explorer copyrights. At the start of 2011 I got in touch with Robby Holland, then the head of TI's patent licensing division. Holland could not find anything about the computer systems division, or anything about the sale, or whether they owned the rights anymore. They did not have any of the…
Texas Instruments closed their Lisp Machine activities in 1990. Nobody picked that up.
Re: Announcing PilMCU, the Lisp Machine on a Chip
#35Can it run emacs?
I think emacs needs a POSIX-like environment to run inside. (I think this is roughly correct even though I don't really understand what it means.)