The Year 2004 in Microprocessors

DeanMan writes "From spintronics to clockless CPUs, 2004 was a year of process and research in the microprocessor industry. As a way to transition into the new year, this article offers a month-by-month look at the highlights of the 2004 microprocessor timeline."

Comments

Re:Clockless CPUs

[Spitfire75]

From TFA: http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2004Nov/bch20041 104027700.htm Asynchronous processors are capable of allowing each of their units to run independent of a global synchronizing clock, saving the power consumption--not to mention the design life cycle--of a complicated and usually power-hungry clock route scheme. The clock is increasingly the source of a large amount of power consumption, because of both the increasingly long relative wire length and the buffers (extra gates) required to repeat the signals in high-clock-speed devices. Obviously, the elegance of this low power design comes at a cost, in fact a barrier cost to high volume manufacturers. First of all, there is a great reliability issue for high-speed devices. No clock means potential race conditions and other performance/functional conflicts.

Be less optimistic about clockless design

[slashdot_nobody_nowh]

One should remember that clockless design
poses two huge difficulties:

1) verification (both logical and timing);
2) in-chip noise.

Clocking allows oscillations created
by generating edges to fade out before
the sampling edge.

In clockless designs signals change whenever they
want in a sense, so sampling may occur while
the noise (parasitic oscillations) is still high,
and wrong values will be stored/used.