Philips, ARM Collaborate On Asynchronous CPU

Sean D. Solle writes "While not an actual off-the-shelf chip, Philips and ARM have announced a clockless ARM core using what they call "Handshake Technology." Read on for more about just what that means; according to this article, the asynchronous ARM chip has yet to be developed, but the same Philips subsidiary has applied similar technology to other microprocessors.

Sean D. Solle continues "Back in the early 1990's there was a lot of excitement (well, Acorn users got excited) about Prof. Steve Furber's asynchronous ARM research project, "Amulet". The idea is to let the CPU's component blocks run at their own rate, synchronising with each other only when needed. Like a normal RISC processor, one instruction typically takes one clock cycle; but in a clockless ARM, a cycle can take less time for different classes of instructions.

For example, a MOV instruction could finish before (and hence consume less power than) an ADD, even though they both execute in a single cycle. As well as energy-efficiency, running at effectively random frequencies reduces a chip's RFI emissions - handy if it's living in a cellphone or other wireless device."

Comments

Intel were first...

[rhs98]

1997 - "Intel develops an asynchronous, Pentium-compatible test chip that run three times as fast, on half the power, as its synchronous equivalent. The device never makes it out of the lab."

I am amazed at how stupid you are

[Anonymous Coward]

"Taking out the clock and relying on the chip parts to fire and return means that each application in the system must return to the OS at some point to allow the OS a chance to queue up the next thread. Without the clock interrupt, the OS is at the mercy of the program, back to the bad old days of cooperative multitasking."

They will include a clock interrupt, you retard. They just mean the CPU core itself isn't clocked.