jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) (02/13/88)
From Computerworld: "Seeking to stem the tide of continuing financial losses, troubled Symbolics announced the resignation of its two top officers last week." Brian Sear resigned as president, COO and member of the board. Russell Noftsiker resigned as CEO, but will continue as chairman. Symbolics dismissed their chief financial officer last month. Symbolics lost $15.4 Million on $23.8M in revenues in the second quarter. Includes $11.2M for restructuring costs. Teknowledge said it will lay of 60 of its 200 (CW incorrectly reported this) worker as the company ceases direct-marketing efforts. Teknowledge reported 2nd quarter revenue of $3.8M and a loss of $6.7M. Includes $5.8M in restructuring costs. Jeffrey M. Jacobs CONSART Systems Inc. Technical and Managerial Consultants P.O. Box 3016, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266 (213)376-3802 CIS:75076,2603 BIX:jeffjacobs USENET: jjacobs@well.UUCP
dzzr@beta.UUCP (Douglas J Roberts) (02/17/88)
In article <5233@well.UUCP>, jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes: > > From Computerworld: > > "Seeking to stem the tide of continuing financial losses, troubled Symbolics > announced the resignation of its two top officers last week." > > Brian Sear resigned as president, COO and member of the board. Russell > Noftsiker resigned as CEO, but will continue as chairman. Symbolics > dismissed their chief financial officer last month. > > Symbolics lost $15.4 Million on $23.8M in revenues in the second > quarter. Includes $11.2M for restructuring costs. > Sad to say, but the resignations at Symbolics are no great surprise. While Symoblics still provides a premier software development environment (go ahead, flame me: I'll just ignore it), look at how far they've fallen behind in the hardware arena: 1) A Sun 3/260 w/16 MB will compare favorably to Symbolics' top-of-the-line 3670 in terms of run-time for large CL applications. A diskless 3/260 goes for about $35,800 (retail), whereas Symbolics is still in the one-full-up-machine-per-user mode, at about $75,000 per whack for a 3650 w/16 MB (slightly slower than the 3670). 2) The Sun 4/whatever: promises to be about about 3 - 4 times faster than the 3/260. (A guess - I haven't done any benches, but stuff presented in comp.arch would indicate the expected speed-up). 3) A Sun 68030 - based machine, purported to be ?x faster than a 3/260. 4) After 3) above, I wouldn't be surprised to see Sun bump the clock on the Sun 4/whatever from 10 MHz to 20 or more. By comparison, what new hardware does Symbolics have in the pipe? The only official thing we've heard about here is the Ivory VLSI chip machine. It will supposedly deliver a 3x runtime improvement over the 3670. As if the growing hardware performance/$ gap were not sufficient reason for unease at Symbolics, Sun is also making some right moves WRT their LISP development environment. SPE, (Symbolic Programming Environment) promises to bring much of the LISP machine - like development and debugging functionality to the Sun's LISP environment. (The current Sun LISP development environment could kindly be described as "sparse"). As a consumer of LISP hardware & software, I would hate to see Symbolics drop out of the running: competition is beneficial. On the other hand, it's a tough world out there... --------------------------------------------------------------------- These opinions are my very own. In fact, I seriously doubt that anyone else would claim them. Doug Roberts Los Alamos National Laboratory dzzr@lanl.gov
dzzr@beta.UUCP (Douglas J Roberts) (02/18/88)
> > 4) After 3) above, I wouldn't be surprised to see Sun bump the > clock on the Sun 4/whatever from 10 MHz to 20 or more. ^^^ MIPS Sorry about that. --------------------------------------------------------------------- These opinions are my very own. In fact, I seriously doubt that anyone else would claim them. Doug Roberts Los Alamos National Laboratory dzzr@lanl.gov
miller@ACORN.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller) (02/19/88)
Date: 17 Feb 88 04:40:09 GMT
From: dzzr@beta.UUCP (Douglas J Roberts)
1) A Sun 3/260 w/16 MB will compare favorably to Symbolics'
top-of-the-line 3670 in terms of run-time for large CL applications. A
diskless 3/260 goes for about $35,800 (retail), whereas Symbolics is
still in the one-full-up-machine-per-user mode, at about $75,000 per
whack for a 3650 w/16 MB (slightly slower than the 3670).
Slower? I thought it was about 1.4x *faster*. And a 16MB 3620 (the same
processor, but slower disks, diffo cabinet) would only set you back about
$55k. *NOT* diskless. If you are going to compare to a SUN, then add disks
to the machine. Or count some fraction of the cost of your sever and
remember that you are paging over the net.
2) The Sun 4/whatever: promises to be about about 3 - 4 times
faster than the 3/260. (A guess - I haven't done any benches, but stuff
presented in comp.arch would indicate the expected speed-up).
By comparison, what new hardware does Symbolics have in the pipe? The
only official thing we've heard about here is the Ivory VLSI chip
machine. It will supposedly deliver a 3x runtime improvement over the
3670.
And more, when geometries shrink.
As if the growing hardware performance/$ gap were not sufficient reason
for unease at Symbolics, Sun is also making some right moves WRT their
LISP development environment. SPE, (Symbolic Programming Environment)
promises to bring much of the LISP machine - like development and
debugging functionality to the Sun's LISP environment. (The current Sun
LISP development environment could kindly be described as "sparse").
Well, this too is an opinion, but from what I've heard, I'm not holding my
breath. Lets face it, you can't make a lispm out of a box that is running
UNIX. Now if you get rid of UNIX and have a unified address space sans
kernel protections, if you can run >1 process that share *all* memory, if
you can debug one process from another (no, ptrace is not sufficient), if
you have incremental compilation of everything (including the kernel), if
your machine understands objects instead of addresses, and a few dozen other
small improvements, *then* maybe you have something. SPARC may be a strong
step in this direction, but someone needs to port Genera to it.
As a consumer of LISP hardware & software, I would hate to see Symbolics
drop out of the running: competition is beneficial. On the other hand,
it's a tough world out there...
CP/M runs C. Lets say I give you a CP/M box just as fast as a SUN and it
runs C faster than UNIX does. Would you buy it? I wouldn't. CP/M doesn't do
what I need compared to UNIX, and never will without effectively *becoming*
Unix. I can say the same about UNIX vs. Genera[*]. It just isn't sufficient.
So, maybe this is the difference between buying a $20k pair of speakers and
a 2k pair: is it 10x better? Nah, maybe 15%. Diminishing returns. But to
some of us, it *is* worth it because our *time* is worth more than the
incremental machine cost. I would hate to see Symbolics go, because it means
we are all going to be stuck driving econobox chevy's --- with all those
crowd pleasing features that have nothing to do with what *you* need.
Thanks, but I don't *want* a machine that has been mass-produced to solve
everybody's spreadsheet and array crunching problems. I want a machine that
*helps me write software* that does things I didn't even know how to do when
I started writing it.
Brad Miller
[*] Or TI's system. Maybe even Xerox's system: for the level of discussion
in this article they are probably interchangeable. I have a Symbolics on my
desk, so that's what I'm most familiar with. I don't mean to slight other
lispm vendors.
------
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...allegra!rochester!miller}
Brad Miller
University of Rochester Computer Science Department
'If anything is True, this is.'dzzr@beta.UUCP (Douglas J Roberts) (02/19/88)
In article <6908@sol.ARPA>, miller@ACORN.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller) writes: The discussion was about the processing speeds of a Symbolics 3650 vs a 3670. > Slower? I thought it was about 1.4x *faster*. Our benches show the 3650 to be ~20% slower than a 3570. > And a 16MB 3620 (the same > processor, but slower disks, diffo cabinet) would only set you back about > $55k. *NOT* diskless. Our benches showed that the Symbolics 3620 suffered severe performance (speed) degradation as garbage collection progressed, because of its slow Winchester drives. Initially, the 3620 ran approximately as fast as a 3600, but as GC and paging demand increased performance rapidly dropped off to the point that a benchmark run took 45% longer on the 3620 than on the 3600. Thus the reason for comparison between a Symbolics 3650 and a Sun 3/260: equivalent run times. > If you are going to compare to a SUN, then add disks > to the machine. Or count some fraction of the cost of your sever and > remember that you are paging over the net. Ok. Four user Sun system: Sun 3/280 Server w/2 280 MB drives ~74,600 4 - 3/260 diskless, 16MB ~143,200 Total 217,800 (Ignore misc cables, etc.) Cost / user: 54,450 Four user Symbolics 3650 configuration (believe me, the 3620 is not sufficient for large KEE applications). Cost / user: 75,000 So far, paging over the net with our Suns hasn't hurt us. We don't have any numbers yet, but it's beginning to appear that 1 server can handle 7 - 8 diskless clients running large LISP images before it will start to bog down. > Lets face it, you can't make a lispm out of a box that is running > UNIX. Have you *seen* SPE yet? (I kind of doubt it. We're beta testers, so there can't be too many people outside of Sun familiar with it.) It's pretty damn close to a LISPM. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Doug Roberts Los Alamos National Laboratory dzzr@lanl.gov
malcolm@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Malcolm Slaney) (02/20/88)
In article <6908@sol.ARPA> miller@ACORN.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller) writes: > By comparison, what new hardware does Symbolics have in the pipe? The > only official thing we've heard about here is the Ivory VLSI chip > machine. It will supposedly deliver a 3x runtime improvement over the > 3670. > >And more, when geometries shrink. And by then the merchent semiconductor companies will be running even faster. The real point is that it is widely acknowledged that Symbolics has a lot of real nifty environment ideas. Why do they continue to shoot themselves in the foot by assuming they can build hardware better than the rest of the world? > > As if the growing hardware performance/$ gap were not sufficient reason > for unease at Symbolics, Sun is also making some right moves WRT their > LISP development environment. SPE, (Symbolic Programming Environment) > promises to bring much of the LISP machine - like development and > debugging functionality to the Sun's LISP environment. (The current Sun > LISP development environment could kindly be described as "sparse"). > >Well, this too is an opinion, but from what I've heard, I'm not holding my >breath. Lets face it, you can't make a lispm out of a box that is running >UNIX. Why not? Unix is just an overgrown IO multiplexer. Both Franz and Lucid now support lightweight processes in their systems; if you really want to read your mail from within Lisp you can load a Lisp mail reader into its own process. >Now if you get rid of UNIX Not all of us Symbolics hackers see this as an advantage. I spend a lot of time hacking on both Symbolics LispM's and Sun LispM's and there are some things the Symbolics does better. On the other hand the Sun Lisp's have a lot of big advantages. For example, when debugging package problems it is SO nice to be able to reload a new world in only a few seconds instead of waiting forever for the Symbolics machine to reboot. Secondly the network window systems on the Unix side of things (eg X and NeWS) make it easy to run my Lisp on a remote compute server and have all my windows on the local screen. I do this all the time at work now (I have a 3/160 on my desk and use a 3/260 for my crunching) and I hope to do it even more when I get an obsolete Sun 2 at home and run over 19.2K dialup. There is no reason that the Symbolics machine can't do these things. Suns SPE is not the entire solution but it is a LONG way towards getting the programming benefits of a Symbolics machine. >SPARC may be a strong >step in this direction, but someone needs to port Genera to it. I'd love to see this...then we could compare them on more equal footing. Malcolm