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I don't think that's right. 1) I think an architecture change -- any architecture change -- is expensive. Intel and AMD dumped many billions of dollars into R&
by blagie 5y ago
I don't think that's right.
1) I think an architecture change -- any architecture change -- is expensive. Intel and AMD dumped many billions of dollars into R&D around existing architectures, and an asynchronous one starts without a lot of that benefit.
2) There's a ton of stuff -- chipsets, RAM, software, etc. -- built up around synchronous. The engineering cost go up astronomically.
3) That's not to mention baseline engineering costs.
Async won't give a 2x boost to performance. I would guess it'd be 10%, maybe even 30%. That's not nearly enough to justify the investment.
Ivan Sutherlands' work certainly won't compete with teams 10+x times that size and investment.
- FullyFunctional 5y agoThere is no 10% boost - it's fiction ADDED: With the millions spent on getting just a minor single digit improvement, you think the big players wouldn't jump on clock-less immediately if they could? Note, Intel did use (does?) use domino logic in the ALU and FPU. The benefit just isn't there for clock-less. I personally know of companies that tried and gave up on it. To your other points, you wouldn't boil the ocean; you keep everything else clocked as usual and bridge between them.
- blagie 5y agoI think there's a long graveyard of conceptually better architectures which died because people underestimated costs, from Transmeta, to all sorts of SIMD and MIMD systems, to VLIW. I agree it's not too expensive to prototype, but it's super-expensive to do *right*.