17 Nov
2011
17 Nov
'11
5:43 a.m.
On Nov 17, 2011, at 12:43 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Years ago, asynchronous computing was a hot
topic--essentially,
instructions were unclocked and took however long it required to
signals to propogate through the logic to complete.
That was the gist of Achronix' idea--that you could get some
freakingly fast computation out of a clockless design.
I also recall that the Philco System 2000 was one of the few
commercial versions utilizing that idea. "Asynchronous" was part of
their advertising campaign--and, for a very short time, they had one
of the fastest transistorized machines.
Chuck Moore's newest Forth chips (which is painting them with a broad brush,
they're stack machines, but they're really meant for Forth) at
http://www.greenarrays.com run asynchronously. Those are actually some pretty neat chips.
I don't know if they're going anywhere, but his previous Forth chips have had
some success in the market, and I'd love to play around with one.
- Dave