[net.lang.lisp] Hummingboard infos

Rosu@cui.UUCP@ndmce.uucp (ROSU Claudia) (10/18/86)

Does anybody know anything about the 

	hummingboard (lispmachine board) ?

Thank you for any information.

jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) (10/19/86)

The Humming board is an 80386 with 16 megabytes of memory and
"special" hardware additions, apparently to do typechecking.

It is a "coprocessor" board, with a price around $7,000.  It is available
from Gold Hill and runs their Development Environment.  It is said to
provide a speed improvement of a factor of 2 over an AT.

 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: well!jjacobs

yoram@tom.columbia.edu (Yoram Eisenstadter) (10/20/86)

In article <1958@well.UUCP> jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes:

>The Humming board is an 80386 with 16 megabytes of memory and
>"special" hardware additions, apparently to do typechecking.
>
>It is a "coprocessor" board, with a price around $7,000.  It is available
>from Gold Hill and runs their Development Environment.  It is said to
>provide a speed improvement of a factor of 2 over an AT.

Do you really mean a factor of 2?  Sounds like it should be more like
10.  Any of the features you mentioned (386 instead of 286, 16 meg
memory, hardware type-checking) should contribute at least a factor
of 2 in performance.  If it's really a factor of two, they must be
doing something seriously wrong...

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duc@wjh12.HARVARD.EDU (Dan Costin) (10/20/86)

In article <1958@well.UUCP> jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes:
>
>The Humming board is an 80386 with 16 megabytes of memory and
>...
>provide[s] a speed improvement of a factor of 2 over an AT.
> Jeffrey M. Jacobs

I believe Golden Hill says the speed improvement factor is about 5.

That makes it run about as fast as a Symbolics, I believe.

-dan costin

jeff@kestrel.ARPA (Jeff Kitson) (10/22/86)

The Gold Hill data sheet says, "This new system performs up to five times
faster than the PC AT-based GCLISP 286 Developer, providing an attractive
PC alternative to LISP machine development."  (note: GCLISP 286 Developer
is a Gold Hill product).

The Hummingboard holds 6Mbytes of RAM (and can be upgraded to 24Mbytes 
when 1Mbit DRAMS are available (I was told the board uses DRAMS in SIP
packages so that may affect availability and cost).  The data sheet also
says, "The HummingBoard supports the Intel Above-board standard, allowing
users to run large EMS standard programs on their 8088 or 80286 processors
accessing the 386 HummingBoard's on-board memory."  I'm not sure if
this means that the HummingBoard can use the EMS memory for lisp.

I can only pass on what I've read in their brochures and from talking to
someone there.  I would certainly like to hear more from anyone who
is actually using the HummingBoard.
-- 
Jeff Kitson                 jeff@kestrel.arpa

jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) (10/24/86)

In article <1958@well.UUCP> jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes:
>
>The Humming board is an 80386 with 16 megabytes of memory and
>...
>provide[s] a speed improvement of a factor of 2 o

The information that I published is apparenlty
incorrect. The Humminbgobard only has
1 megabyte, and I cnanot confirm type
checking hardwawre.