The LispOS Project: a position paper, part 2

[Dwight Hughes]

| From: Alaric B. Williams <alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk>
| 
| > | I would like option a, but nobody would buy it :-(.
| > 
| > I wonder what could be done these days with a handful of Altera or
Xilinx
| > FPGAs - I've never really known enough about the LispM designs to be
able
| > to make an estimate. Might be worth a bit of thought -- perhaps a
| > "freeIvory"
| > (well, "cheapIvory", hardware is never free) design on PCI bus cards?
| 
| I once tried to design the cheapest CPU I could imagine - cheapest
| per unit of processing power, that is. I'm not a CPU expert by
| any stretch of the imagination, but if anyone's interested, I'll
| be happy to put my ideas into words for them.

Sure, I'd be interested. With Altera FPGAs getting up in the range of
130,000 gate equivalents, with 32Kbits of configurable RAM, there
are interesting possibilities for custom processors/coprocessors.