Announcing PilMCU, the Lisp Machine on a Chip

I&#x27;d really like to see the full ISA, etc for the chip. A few years ago, I was doing research on building a byte code based vm after working through Peter Michaux &quot;Scheme From Scratch&quot; <a href="http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-introduction" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;peter.michaux.ca&#x2F;articles&#x2F;scheme-from-scratch-introdu...</a>. (I highly recommend running through his code, but do the GC earlier, it&#x27;s easier to get it from the start than to try to add it.) I couldn&#x27;t find anything online listing the kinds of instructions you&#x27;d want in a lisp chip.

Yes, it can be done, but the half-dozen or so LISP machines of the 1980s were not very successful. Price&#x2F;performance was worse than compiled LISP on common CPUs.<p>There&#x27;s no indication of hardware support for garbage collection. It would probably be more useful to have tag bits to support GC than a LISP-oriented instruction set, especially if it allowed concurrent GC.

Talking about Lisp machines. I don&#x27;t know much about these things but I was thinking about them recently when Hewlett Packard announced its so-called <i>Machine</i>^1. They want to build a new kind of OS for it, but wouldn&#x27;t a Lisp machine just do?<p>[1] <a href="http://www8.hp.com/hpnext/posts/discover-day-two-future-now-machine-hp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www8.hp.com&#x2F;hpnext&#x2F;posts&#x2F;discover-day-two-future-now-...</a>

where&#x27;s the kickstarter page? I want a few of those.

I&#x27;ve heard a few people suggest that with single core performance stagnating we may see more ASICs. I admit I&#x27;m skeptical, but this line of development does seem worth exploring.

So this is something where the hardware is executing something that actually looks like LISP sort of like the Reduceron does with Haskell?

No links to the actual thing?

Do you have a diagram with the design? Something to amuse people even more? ;)

Where is the verilog source?

Is verilog design small enough to put on an FPGA?

Can it run emacs?