Someone's already figured out a way to run Conway's Game of Life asynchronously. Check it out:<p><a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/wrapper.jsp?arnumber=1029886" rel="nofollow">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/wrapper.jsp?arnumber=10298...</a><p>I didn't read the paper carefully enough to be sure how it works, but it looks like each cell (or region of cells) maintains a count of how many generations have passed, and it blocks until adjacent cells have caught up to it. So time propagates across the board like waves on a pond.<p>&#62; That adder sounds like a bit of magic, do you have a link for that?<p>Sure! Here's the paper:<p><a href="http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/async/publications/cheng-unger-theobald-tc2000.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/async/publications/cheng-unger-t...</a><p>I'll summarize it briefly. You know about ripple carry adders, where the carry bits propagate across the adder and it takes O(n) time? Well, the adder for each bit can sometimes precompute its carry output. If both inputs are 1, it knows that its carry output will be 1. There are some other tricks like that. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that an asynchronous ripple carry adder can operate in O(lg n) average time, and an asynchronous carry-lookahead adder can work in O(lg lg n) average time. Or about twice as fast as a synchronous carry lookahead adder, according to transistor-level simulations.<p>&#62; I can picture the cpu that 'sleeps on 0', basically the transitions are what clocks it forward so as long as you keep sending it 0's it simply never changes state right? (no state changes -&#62; minimal power consumption).<p>Asynchronous design is like ideal clock gating: when part of a processor doesn't need to do anything, it just stays idle and doesn't dissipate dynamic power. In the example of a bit-serial length-adaptive datapath that I mentioned, the leading zero bits are simply ignored, and no processor work needs to be done to deal with them. Here's a paper on it:<p><a href="http://vlsi.cornell.edu/~rajit/ps/bitsnap.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://vlsi.cornell.edu/~rajit/ps/bitsnap.pdf</a>