Old tricks undermine clock importance

According to the Economist, two old chip design ideas are contributing to the attack on clock speeds as the measure of a chip's worth. Already, slower chips are outperforming technically faster silicon, but multi-threading and asynchronous logic chip-design techniques may necessitate new ways of rating microprocessors. The article describes work on multi-threading and asynchronous logic, both invented decades ago but now gaining support.

Multi-threading was pioneered by Burton Smith, Cray's chief scientist, and applied to mass-market microprocessors by researchers at the University of Washington. It increases a chip's ability to change states to deal with diverse demands more efficiently. Meanwhile, research progresses on asynchronous or "clockless" designs that depart from reliance on the oscillating crystal "clock." Asynchronous logic was used in the earliest machines built in the 1950s but has garnered increasing interest lately.

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