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A comment on Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full production. Parent comment

Re:Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full... by neuraxon77 on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @07:53PM (#3268197)
As far as I know, the cores aren't clocked. Instead Chuck designed his own transistors using his own OKAD II VLSI tools to be efficient on the CMOS process node with switching speeds being dictated by the transistor type and interconnect electrical properties, then designed the cores so that they're only switching those transistors when they do actual work.
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Re:Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full... by jfriedly on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @11:08PM (#3268718)
From the site's Green Arrays Architecture paper [1]:

Our architecture explicitly omits a clock, saving energy and time among other benefits.

Also, they quoted instruction execution time as being as low as 1400 picoseconds, so 700MHz equivalence is probably the best case, not the average case.

Edit: They also say in the architecture paper that their goal is one billion operations per second, or 1GHz.

[1] http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB002-100...

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Re:Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full... by Symmetry on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @08:10PM (#3268258)
Ooh, awesome. Clockless computing seems like a really nifty idea, but its difficult. I imagine it might go mainstream when Moore's law finally runs out.
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Re:Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full... by sliverstorm on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @10:17PM (#3268593)
"difficult" does not even begin to encompass the half of it. It is really cool in theory, but in reality a ridiculously difficult challenge that existing tools are in no way whatsoever up for.
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Re:Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full... by thesz on Wednesday November 23, 2011 @08:13AM (#3269889)
Take a look at the Balsa design system: http://apt.cs.man.ac.uk/projects/tools/balsa/

My colleague uses it for research purposes and he said that it is pretty mature.

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Re:Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full... by sliverstorm on Wednesday November 23, 2011 @01:15PM (#3270978)
I suspect if the only issue was translating architecture to logic, we'd be doing it already
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Re:Forth Inventor Chuck Moore's $20 144 core CPU now in full... by lgeek on Wednesday November 23, 2011 @02:19PM (#3271301)
There are other asynchronous CPUs, including implementations of popular architectures like MIPS and ARM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit#Asynchrono...
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