[mepian]

Indeed. The first single VLSI chip implementation of a Lisp machine, the MegaChip, was done by Texas Instruments in 1987 for its Explorer II workstations. This chip contained 553000 transistors and was afaik very similar to the CADR architecture-wise. Symbolics, one of TI's competitors, released their own VLSI Lisp machine chip next year called the Ivory, which had a more advanced architecture (labeled the I-Machine in the documentation) that used less transistors for its implementation than the MegaChip, only around ~300k.

[dfox]

The somewhat large transistor counts are understandable taking into account that the CADR CPU is mostly an insane (for the time) amount of SRAM (as in hundreds of 1k and 4k chips) coupled to comparatively small logic.