Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 beta 3/9/83; site sdcrdcf.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sdcrdcf!darrelj From: darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Darrel VanBuer) Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: Re: Lisp Machines Message-ID: <813@sdcrdcf.UUCP> Date: Sun, 5-Feb-84 11:48:26 EST Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.813 Posted: Sun Feb 5 11:48:26 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 9-Feb-84 03:26:40 EST References: <16401@sri-arpa.UUCP> Reply-To: darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Darrel VanBuer) Organization: System Development Corporation, Santa Monica Lines: 63 There really no such things as reasonable benchmarks for systems as different 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 VANBUER@USC-ECL.ARPA