On the performance evaluation of asynchronous processor architectures

This paper evaluates and analyses the influence of an asynchronous control paradigm on the performance of processor architectures. The idea of a micronet is introduced which models the datapath as a network of concurrent functional units which communicate with each other asynchronously. This allows the efficient exploitation of fine-grained instruction-level parallelism (ILP). A macronet-based asynchronous processor (MAP) architecture is described in Occam2 and simulated in a parallel discrete event simulation environment. Suitable metrics are introduced for measuring the performance of the MAP datapath