Caltech Potato Chips (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Caltech Potato Chips (1996)

async.caltech.edu

46 pointsch18 comments

Blast from the past! If you think this kind of less traditional circuit design is cool, you should also check out some of the more recent stuff in low-power asynchronous architectures:

http://vlsi.cornell.edu/research.php

https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/neurogrid.htm...

http://paulmerolla.com/merolla_main_som.pdf

And if you want to get an asynchronous chip you can play around with today, check out the GA144 from Greenarrays. I believe this is currently the only commercially available asynchronous processor. http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html

TI famously brags (and has videos demonstrating) that you can power an MSP430 off a lemon.

And the msp430 has two internal clocks/oscillators! (iirc)

MSP430 is a cute little bugger! I also liked the TI's MSP430-derivative evaluation platform that was bundled in a... watch[0]. eZ430 Chronos was my first smartwatch, and it's still somewhere in the closet, still running off that same coin battery it had when I first bought it few years ago.

[0] - http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos

In the Portal 2 video game where the main character throws the erstwhile antagonist (now uneasy ally) GLaDOS computer "chip" into a potato, is that joke connected to this at all?

I was wondering the same thing!

By comparison, today's (January 1996) state-of-the art technologies have feature sizes of about 0.25 microns.

And today (November 2015), chips manufactured on 14 nanometer (0.014 micron) processes are shipping in volume.

Well, that was certainly an enriching read.

More seriously, we've done this before. Old Usenet thread about asynchronous PDP-10s and PDP-6s:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.sys.pdp10/wqWlZQ...

So the processor computation rate increases/decreases as voltage does? This could have interesting applications, such as a treadmill that allows you to compute (run games? watch videos?) more the faster you run, or a phone that gradually decreases the power supply to its processor to conserve power as its battery loses charge.

No, but higher voltage allows for lower gate propogation delay.

I'm afraid that I don't understand the difference...

That is correct, but the difference may not be that noticeable. We can look at the GA144 asynchronous computer as an example. You can find a relevant graph that compares supply voltage to execution speed on page 20 of this reference: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB002-110...

Do not confuse with Potato Semiconductors, which make famous high-speed chips: http://www.potatosemi.com/

Sadly, I've never had the chance to try these Potato chips.

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10612349.

"that's two potatoes in series" - rarely one comes across such a combination of words. I'm still laughing.

Funny, I still have all that exact test equipment shown in the photos, with the exception of the meter in the upper right.

"Sorry for the long post, here's a potato." That must be one of the earliest examples of that meme!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com