Clocks? We don’t need no steeking clocks!

Who says Sun Microsystems isn’t doing leading edge CPU development? We have Ivan Sutherland, father of computer graphics, who’s been working for the last decade on asynchronous computing. Of course, the work is “still five years away from commercialization,” he told his conference audience, but the prototype chip “shows how to eliminate system clocks and get much faster chips than are possible by just increasing system clock speeds.”