News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Three Generations of Asynchronous Microprocessors (2003) ... by mnw21cam on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @08:05AM (#17549075)
The major thing with a clock-based design is that you have to dedicate a huge amount of silicon and power just towards getting a clock signal all over the whole chip.

A group at Cambridge University also designed and fabricated an asynchronous CPU based on an early ARM a long time ago now. Like the ones mentioned in this article, it behaved very well. It would slow down if they pointed a hot air blower at it.

Re:Three Generations of Asynchronous Microprocessors (2003) ... by MaxBarraclough on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @09:17AM (#17549492)
Reminds me of the way loud noises can cause permanent data-loss on hard-drives [0]. This is a real problem with loud fire-suppression gas-release systems [1].

[0] https://www.ontrack.com/blog/2017/01/10/loud-noise-data-loss... [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-a-loud-noise-brought-a-dat...

Re:Three Generations of Asynchronous Microprocessors (2003) ... by moonbug on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @08:37AM (#17549228)
Not thinking of AMULET from Steve Furber @ University of Manchester?
Re:Three Generations of Asynchronous Microprocessors (2003) ... by mnw21cam on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @09:18AM (#17549497)
Hmm. It does appear that perhaps when I was wondering around the Cambridge labs they may have claimed a little more than they should have. Maybe someone working there was collaborating with the Manchester group.
Re:Three Generations of Asynchronous Microprocessors (2003) ... by ur-whale on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @10:13AM (#17549855)
> It would slow down if they pointed a hot air blower at it.

Ah! Made my day :D