Please fill me in....

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Thu, 21 Dec 89 08:45 PST
    From: Spock@SAMSON.CADR.DIALNET.SYMBOLICS.COM (Mr. Spock)

    Maybe I'm mistaken about the general tone of this Symbolic vs.
    "Conventional" machines in the area of price/performance/environment but
    it sounds to me like some of these unix machines are now viable
    alternatives to 36xx's.

    Is this really true????

    We tried a SUN 3/260 (I think) running Lucid, packed to the gills with
    memory, and an extra disk (380 mb, I think) for gobs of paging area and
    our 3600 *still* ran circles around it (even when running Fortran!).
    And the SUN wound up costing us the same $ as our 3600!

    Are the newer SUNs (or whatever) really that much faster?  How much
    memory/disk do you realistically need?  I.e. what do these machines
    *really* cost in order to run lisp effectively?

Sun-4's (now called Sparcstations) are much faster than Sun-3's.  Our
experience is that Sun-4's are 2-3 times as fast at running Lisp (Lucid
version 3.0) than a 36xx.  Note, however, that the benchmark code (the
circuit simulation code we developed to design Connection Machines) has
lots of declarations, which are necessary to get good performance on the
Sun.

    Can you buy a $5-10k workstation that will run lisp effectively?

No.  In order to run Lisp effectively, you need a decent amount of
memory (16Mb, I guess) and a local paging disk.  This would bring the
total cost of the workstation up to $15-20K.

                                                barmar