If we throw away conventional wisdom about how processors work, we could do something magic: throw away the clock. Ivan Sutherland has done some work on a new

If we throw away conventional wisdom about how processors work, we could do something magic: throw away the clock. Ivan Sutherland has done some work on a new processor architecture called Fleet, which takes this premise and rethinks how we should program from the bottom-up. Instead of instructions performing operations, the programming model becomes one of passing messages between individual units in the processor, and the problems become that of traffic management and routing, which happens to relate to functional programming, the actor model, and data-flow paradigms. Have a read of "The tyranny of the clock", and other publications by the Asynchronous Research Center: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mroncken/ARC-2012-is13_TuringCentenary_IvansRemarks.pdf http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mroncken/ARC-2012-is13_TuringCenten... http://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/publications http://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/publications