[Martinus]

Been looking at the theory behind these devices for the past few years on and off, seems ARM (the guys responsible for the processors in your GBA's amoungst a great many other things) have managed to get one on to the market. Considering the clock has always been one of the major limiters on processor speed and is responsible for a significant power drain and heat generation this can only come as a first decent step onto an interesting path.

Linkie

[Col. Fishguts]

Ooh, asynchronous machines .... open interesting possibilities, but are a nightmare to develop/debug.

[ChronoReverse]

*yawn*

Theory's been around forever.  Not much point when the existing clocked designs are just fine (especially with the technique where different clock speeds for different portions of a CPU).

In any case, the next generation of processors from Intel have both higher performance and lower power/heat.

[Shade]

The point is power savings. Whereas a clocked processor uses little power when idling, a clockless processor uses none. Big difference where batteries are used.

[aldo_14]

And reduced electromagnetic interference, too (I presume clock skew could be an issue).  Worth remembering in this context that by far the largest processor market is embedded systems, in actuality the Pc market is miniscule in comparison to the use of stuff like 8 and 16 bit processors used in toasters, remotes, etc.  You don't need a 3GHz processor for an embedded system, but what you do need is minimal heat, interferance and power usage.

[Shade]

Well, for a toaster in particular, maybe an overclocked 4GHz pentium 4 would actually be good idea...

[Turambar]

Well, for a toaster in particular, maybe an overclocked 4GHz pentium 4 would actually be good idea...

actually, i did once modify my PCI slot and gfx card so that instead of a heatsink, i put some bread up next to the GPU.  then, i modified the watercooling on my P4e to dump the water and the heat to a coffee filter, which makes some coffee for me

i called it the breakfast machine


yeah, then i woke up

[WMCoolmon]

Does this mean I can play BF2 at full-res with AA now?

ie Do clockless processors offer any benefit to home PC users, and what is the big difference that makes them 'clockless'.

[FireCrack]

^in clocked processors a signal flows to one input of a tansistor, and then every clck cycle a pulse is sent to another making the nice computation go. When no signal comes at the first terminal of the transistor the clock pulse comes anyways. Depending on weather or not there is a signal at the input of the transistor the clock pulse either passes through or is stopped.

A clockless processer doesnt send a pulse every clock cycle, but rather it somehow figures out if it needs one and does so... somehow.

[Martinus]

Right now the biggest benefit from these chips is the low power but clockless processors have the potential to run much faster than conventional clocked ones. Every single task in a conventional processor is subject to the clock's timing, this means that data irrespective of how fast it's calculated, moved etc. has to wait for a virtual 'ok' from the processor clock before it can be used.

Clockless processors rely on a handshake of sorts between sub-sections on the processor, one signals to another when it's finished working on a piece of data so all of the sub-sections can work at their own rate.

[Kie99]

actually, i did once modify my PCI slot and gfx card so that instead of a heatsink, i put some bread up next to the GPU.  then, i modified the watercooling on my P4e to dump the water and the heat to a coffee filter, which makes some coffee for me

i called it the breakfast machine


yeah, then i woke up