Re: LispM Market Share

[kanderso%dino.bbn.com@RELAY.CS.NET]

  From: "kosma%ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com %ALAN.kahuna.DECNET.LOCKHEED.COM"@warbucks.ai.sri.com
  Date: Mon, 15 Jan 90 15:38:04 CST
  To: slug@warbucks.ai.sri.com
  Subject: LispM Market Share
  
  Date: Mon, 15 Jan 90 13:34 PST
  From: Montgomery Kosma <kosma@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>
  Subject: LispM Market Share
  To: slug@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com
  In-Reply-To: <9001152003.AA06360@uunet.uu.net>
  Message-ID: <19900115213436.9.KOSMA@BLAISE.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>
  
   [...misc deleted...]
  
      4. File read performance is crummy on the Lispms.  Since that's done so
         often, it leaves the impression that the Lispms are slow machines. 
  
  This has got to be one of the most frustrating things about the
  Symbolics for me.  The symbolics may not be an inherently slow machine
  but compared to a sparcstation (or even my amiga :-) it gives the feel
  of being quite sluggish (disk i/o, keyboard response in certain
  situations, changing windows, etc. etc.).  Of course, I use a Connection
  Machine so I'm not used to waiting around unless I *really* have to ;-).
  
Lets get quantitative about this.
?  Why is LISPM I/O is slow?
?  What is a good way to measure relative performance given hardware
   differences? 

      8. Lisp is still has the aura of being the "AI" language.  Lisp
         machines are for AI hackers, no?
  
  I don't know quite how rare it is for somebody to be doing computational
  physics on a Symbolics (probably extremely rare aside from the
  occasionaly Connection Machine front end) but I guess some (at least
  one) people are.  If it wasn't for the Connection Machine I would be
  doing fortran on a sun right now (****DEFINITELY**** not by choice), and
  as it is, we will probably be concentrating more on Sun SPARC front ends
  for the connection machine rather than the symbolics, primarily due to
  issues of speed.
  
I find LISPM a wonderful place to crunch numbers as well as symbols
and objects.  Selling a LISPM as JUST an AI machine is certainly
selling it short.

Is the issue of speed the fact that you can't hang array processors off
your LISPM, or that the number crunching performance of a LISPM isn't
good enough.  I find that with some care in coding, LISPM number
crunch as well as the SUN 3's i have access to.

k