Lisp Machines
dyer%w...@sri-unix.uucp
Does anyone have any reliable benchmarks comparing Lisp
machines, including Symbolics, Dandelion, Dolphin, Dorado,
LMI, VAX 780, etc?
Other features for comparison are also of interest. In particular,
what capabilities are available for integrating a color display
(at least 8 bits/pixel)?
Darrel VanBuer
as various Lisp machines and VAXen are. Each machine has different strengths
and weaknesses. Here is a rough ranking of machines:
VAX 780 running Fortran/C standalone
Dorado (5 to 10X dolphin)
LMI Lambda, Symbolics 3600, KL-10 Maclisp (2 to 3X dolphin)
Dolphin, dandelion, 780 VAX Interlisp, KL-10 Interlisp
Relative speeds are very rough, and dependent on application.
Notes: Dandelion and Dolphin have 16-bit ALUs, as a result most arithmetic
is pretty slow (and things like trancendental functions are even worse
because there's no way to floating arithmetic without boxing each
intermediate result). There is quite a wide range of I/O bandwidth among
these machines -- up to 530 Mbits/sec on a Dorado, 130M on a dolphin).
Strong points of various systems:
Xerox: a family of machines fully compatible at the core-image level,
spanning a wide range of price and performance (as low as $26k for a minumum
dandelion, to $150k for a heavily expanded Dorado). Further, with the
exception of some of the networking and all the graphics, it is very highly
compatible with both Interlisp-10 and Interlisp-VAX (it's reasonable to have
a single set of sources with just a bit of conditional compilation).
Because of the use of a relatively old dialect, they have a large and well
debugged manual as well.
LMI and Symbolics (these are really fairly similar as both are licensed from
the MIT lisp machine work, and the principals are rival factions of the MIT
group that developed it) these have fairly large microcode stores, and as
a result more things are fast (e.g. much of graphics primitives are
microcoded, so these are probably the machines for moby amounts of image
processing and graphics. There are also tools for compiling directly to
microcode for extra speed. These machines also contain a secondary bus such
as Unibus or Multibus, so there is considerable flexibility in attaching
exotic hardware.
Weak points: Xerox machines have a proprietary bus, so there are very few
options (philosphy is hook it to something else on the Ethernet). MIT
machines speak a new dialect of lisp with only partial compatible with
MACLISP (though this did allow adding many nice features), and their cost is
too high to give everyone a machine.
The news item to which this is a response also asked about color displays.
Dolphin: 480x640x4 bits. The 4 bits go thru a color map to 24 bits.
Dorado: 480x640x(4 or 8 or 24 bits). The 4 or 8 bits go thru a color map to
24 bits. Lisp software does not currently support the 24 bit mode.
3600: they have one or two (the LM-2 had 512x512x?) around 1Kx1Kx(8 or 16
or 24) with a color map to 30 bits.
Dandelion: probably too little I/O bandwidth
Lambda: current brochure makes passing mention of optional standard and
high-res color displays.
Disclaimer: I probably have some bias toward Xerox, as SDC has several of
their machines (in part because we already had an application in Interlisp.
--
Darrel J. Van Buer, PhD
System Development Corp.
2500 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(213)820-4111 x5449
...{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdccsu3,trw-unix}!sdcrdcf!darrelj
VAN...@USC-ECL.ARPA