In addition: two months to a compiler? Four to a complete chip? All from a team under 15 ppl?
In the 80s I programmed almost exclusively Lisp machines (CADRs, Symbolics and PARC) and the PDP-10 (also a Lisp machine) and even so I knew the market was tiny and not really growing.
"Because of [Symbolics' automated design] methodology, we were able to do five different revs of the chip on four different technologies, which was pretty amazing [for the time]. ... We took about 10 to 12 man-years to do the Ivory chip, and the only comparable chip contemporaneous to that was the MicroVAX at DEC; I knew some people who worked on that, and their estimate was that it was 70 to 80 man-years to do the MicroVAX. That in a nutshell is the reason that the Symbolics lisp machine was great." -Kalman Reti (2012) https://youtu.be/OBfB2MJw3qg
Non-blub work environments bring sone fantasy-tier goals down to just within possibility by a motivated team of geniuses, which Symbolics had. Reminds me a little of how Alan Kay describes the forgotten art of Starrett erecting the empire state building in under a year: "Gentlemen, this building of yours is going to present unusual problems. Ordinary equipment won't be worth a damn on it. We'll buy and make new stuff, fitted for the job. That's what we do on every big job; it costs less than renting secondhand stuff, and it's more efficient." https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM
I really wish I could see old or recent time teams working in similar environments. I know mentally how they can remove all barriers to exploration and optimization but I've never seen it live. Especially compared to mainstream dev daily life where it's grind and grind and salty tears.
I've found a fascinating page [1].
[1] https://computer.fandom.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Tim...
ARM (1986) has 4 Dhrystone MIPS, and Motorola 68020 (1984, as CISC as you can get) has 4.84 Dhrystone MIPS.
RISC was not riding economy of scale then, it barely existed on the periphery of the mass computing, being utilized in very expensive workstations or cheap arcade game consoles. The first significant RISC chip that made any waves was Alpha AXP 21064, when banks worldwide started to buy these in bulks.
The fact that 68020 outperformed ARMv2 is what people from Syymbolics had at hand then, in 1986, writing that document.
Symbolics competed in the very expensive workstation market, their machines cost more than most in that category, so they had to keep up the performance of MIPS R2000.
MIPS was slower clock-frequency-wise than competitive offerings from Intel and/or Motorola and better pipeline design of MIPS did not add much.
Complex expensive workstation like IRIS used proprietary hardware to boost I/O bandwidth and/or to have several CPUs working in parallel. It was easier for SGI to make CPUs and other hardware around them in accord and I honestly think that Symbolics was able to pull something like that.
MIPS grown on very different soil, it was from beginning pushed by business shark.
Only much later, created ARM holding and they pushed ARM architecture to mass market, but even now their behavior looking strangely lazy, as for me.
But game consoles are fair, as they was specialized machines, made with good silicone and with large scale production.
On the same time, I'm not agree to consider 68020 as genuine CISC machine - I think it is more fair to consider it hybrid - RISC-optimized CISC (or, as it named on rumor talks - "mini on one chip").
I think, genuine CISC machines was most S/360 and some mini-machines, like Alto in which was documented feature to develop your own microcode (in S/360 it was marketed feature with high value, because with custom microcode, 360 could run software compiled for older hardware like 1401 or 7xx/7xxx series).
And I agree with you, RISC achieve market adoption, when micro-processor (one-chip CPU) market share become so large, that these games with compatibility with old machines become non interest financially.
So, as resume, I say, RISC machines are not players of CISC market, they are essentially players of micro-market, which in mid 1980s was not much more than games and terminals for mainframes and mini's (micro with, say 128k RAM is considerable to run accounting for small business but impossible to do more).
In 1990s, RAM become so cheap, micro's swallowed mini's market, and appear clouds, so become possible to run large enterprise accounting on micro hardware. And at that moment, created Alpha, and than AMD-K8, which was essentially Alpha with hardware translator of x86 instructions to RISC.
So, after all these adventures, RISC entered market via back door :)
The maker of Golden Common Lisp partnered with a hardware company to make a "Lisp machine on an ISA card" solution for PCs called the Hummingboard (not to be confused with present-day SBCs using that name). It was just a 386 and gobs of memory on a card. (this predates the Compaq 386-based PC). A special build of Golden CL sent compiled code to be executed on the 386 instead of the PC's main CPU.
However the strategy of "retreat to the high end" rather than producing something in volume might have contributed to the rejection; they had no strategy for a volume system that would have gotten them more desktop / technical workstation sales.
What they should have done is cannibalise themselves. Something extremely difficult, but it could be done.
Fairchild did that with the integrated circuit. There was a coup inside from the people that wanted to kill the IC and stay selling expensive in small quantities instead of going to earning way less per unit en masse.
I know Symbolics had coprocessor boards that used their existing architectures, but stuck it on a NuBus and plugged into old Macs to run Genera in a window.
Perhaps they could have stuck with that: I could see SGI workstations with Symbolics coprocessor boards leveraging the foothold they had in 3D graphics and animation, for example. Or a RAD development environment for technical computing on NeXT computers offloading hard symbolic computations as needed, since NeXT had high-end RAD as their selling point.
One could use a NuVista graphics board and Genera could use that directly.
One could also put several UX400 / UX1200 boards into a single SUN using its VMEbus.
On SGI it seemed that (later?) several 3d graphics applications used Allegro CL -> perhaps that was powerful enough. For Symbolics to really make sense of SGIs would have made it necessary to tap into the graphics hardware&software from the embedded Ivory boards.
That is answer. Mini-computers first appear as cheap alternatives to mainframes, where was impossible to just connect client by leased line.
Micro-computers created, when semiconductors grow to stage, when could put whole CPU on one die, so they just substituted mini's.
At first, semiconductors don't allow to put numeric coprocessor on same die with CPU, so short time existed wonders like Weitek, but when first RISC appeared, already existed i486 with integrated coprocessor, so discrete coprocessor was already not viable economically.
Yes, much later appear ccNUMA (cache bus with cross-bar switch interconnect), but it's complexity IMHO close to coprocessor, so it became viable on very large scale, I think 16 cores or more.
As I know, first MIPS CPU designed by exactly one engineer. Next generations designed by team.
Also I know, one engineer could make Fort compiler in less than month, and I don't think core Lisp is much different from Fort.
So, it is not easy to design compiler and chip by 15 ppl team in half year, but it is achievable.