On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 03:03:12PM -0700, David Barbour wrote: > And I've seen Grace Hopper's video on nanoseconds before. If you carry a > piece of wire of the right length, it isn't difficult to say where light > carrying information will be after a few nanoseconds. :D
Few ns are effective eternities in terms of modern gate delays. I presume the conversation was about synchronization, which should be avoided in general unless absolutely necessary, and not done directly in hardware. Ditto clocks, as distributed systems of oscillators would tend to sync up due to local coupling. No need for a centralized, global clock. Purely asynchronous CPUs show clocks are not necessary, and even for cloked systems there are ways to save on power and distribution delays http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/powersaving-clock-scheme-in-new-pcs http://www.extremetech.com/computing/119507-amd-to-use-resonant-clock-mesh-to-push-trinity-above-4ghz _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
