Hacker News Reader

The last CPU that was being developed at Symbolics is actually RISC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics#Sunstone

The competitor LMI was also developing their next-generation Lisp machine RISC processor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines#GigaMos_Systems

More about the latter: http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/kmachine.htm

View on HN

Well, Symbolics did not manufacture the new CPU. That would have been too costly.

LMI manufactured prototypes of their CPU, but these were older technology - not microprocessors, but VME-board sized CPUs.

Xerox mantioned that they were developing a Lisp RISC, but it never surfaced. The SPUR project designed a Lisp RISC Chip: ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/markhill/Papers/jsscc89_vlsi_spur.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com