3 ms·
I'm curious if asynchronous logic will get brought back in as time goes on. Multi-core is essentially desynchronising the individual cores since (iirc) clock g
by shabble 15y ago
I'm curious if asynchronous logic will get brought back in as time goes on. Multi-core is essentially desynchronising the individual cores since (iirc) clock generation and distribution is one of the most expensive parts of the processor, in both energy and size.
Historically, it lost out because of the added complexity of handshaking/synchroniser logic scattered all over the place, and the mess a mishandled metastable condition propagating through the system could cause. How that we've got transistors to burn, however, and routing is no longer done on large empty floors with crepe tape...
- copper 15y agoWell, Handshake did make an asynchronous ARM core not too long ago, and Achronix has a nice business in async FPGAs, so the idea isn't dead. That said, I'm not sure (though I'd love to be proved wrong) that the idea will really go big again. Synchronous chips are still easier to reason about. By far the most expensive real estate on a typical processor is on-chip RAM, and that really does need a clock. Sure, clock-tree synthesis is complex enough that you may even still be able to start up a company selling a tool for it, but it's still possible for a few reasonably competent engineers to do within some weeks.
- scarmig 15y agoChuck Moore also has recently released a clockless asynchronous chip, 144 core. Though it has to be programmed in an obscure dialect of colorForth...