

The World's First Vegetable Powered RISC (1988) - nyellin
http://www.async.caltech.edu/~mika/potato/potato.html

======
nyellin
_The Caltech Asynchronous Microprocessor (1988) was the first asynchronous
microprocessor (1988). Caltech designed and manufactured the world's first
fully Quasi Delay Insensitive processor. During demonstrations, the
researchers amazed viewers by loading a simple program which ran in a tight
loop, pulsing one of the output lines after each instruction. This output line
was connected to an oscilloscope. When a cup of hot coffee was placed on the
chip, the pulse rate (the effective "clock rate") naturally slowed down to
adapt to the worsening performance of the heated transistors. When liquid
nitrogen was poured on the chip, the instruction rate shot up with no
additional intervention. Additionally, at lower temperatures, the voltage
supplied to the chip could be safely increased, which also improved the
instruction rate—again, with no additional configuration._

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit#Asynchron...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_circuit#Asynchronous_CPU)

