1 Jan
2018
1 Jan
'18
8:52 p.m.
On 2018-Jan-01, at 5:06 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
The IAS machine (1952, and in some measure a template design for modern processors) and
its clones (ILLIAC, ORDVAC, MANIAC, etc.) were billed as an asynchronous design, although
I haven't seen the details to see precisely what that meant in context.
On Jan 1,
2018, at 3:57 PM, David Bridgham via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 01/01/2018 03:33 PM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:
This was my understanding, as well.
More recently there was the AMULET processors designed at the University
of Manchester.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMULET_microprocessor
One of the stories I read about the AMULET was that they wrote a little
program to blink an LED where the timing was determined by a busy loop.
If they sat a hot cup of coffee on the processor, the light would blink
slower; a cup of ice water and it would blink faster.
Neat. I found this 2011 paper that's interesting:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nowick/nowick-singh-ieee-dt-11-published.pdf
The company I was trying to remember is Fulcrum, which was bought by Intel; they had
morphed into an Ethernet switch chip company by then. A pretty good one, as I recall.
But the original concept was a microprocessor, possibly a MIPS one, I don't remember.
The idea was that the chip speed would depend on how fast things happened to work, so
different chips would run at different speeds due to process variations, and power supply
and temperature changes would also affect things just as you described.
The paper I just mentioned lists a number of early computer designs as asynchronous,
though it doesn't mention the ARRA 1, probably because it's not well known (a
problem common to Dutch computers). Also, those other computers did work. From:
Paul Koning
The only asynchronous computer I can think of is
the Dutch ARRA 1
Isn't the KA10 basically asynchronous? (I know, it has a clock, but I'm
not sure how much it is used for.)