Can Elastic circuits provide more performance in highly-parallel systems?
Definitely yes. Highly-parallel systems (e.g. many-core systems) have a large amount of processing units. Even though each processing unit may be in a different clock domain, a PLL typically provides the clock for all the components of the system. The frequency of this PLL must be conservatively defined to account for the variability of all processing units. With this approach, many of the “fast” units must run their tasks at the speed determined by the “slow” units. By making a system elastic, the processing units can run at their natural frequency independently from the frequency of the other units. With this technology, the average throughput of the system will have a significant improvement. This feature may be especially interesting for systems showing a high degree of concurrency. Two typical examples are multi-core systems running multiples threads in data servers, or Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
