MSP430 is a cute little bugger! I also liked the TI's MSP430-derivative evaluation platform that was bundled in a... watch[0]. eZ430 Chronos was my first smartwatch, and it's still somewhere in the closet, still running off that same coin battery it had when I first bought it few years ago.
So the processor computation rate increases/decreases as voltage does? This could have interesting applications, such as a treadmill that allows you to compute (run games? watch videos?) more the faster you run, or a phone that gradually decreases the power supply to its processor to conserve power as its battery loses charge.
That is correct, but the difference may not be that noticeable. We can look at the GA144 asynchronous computer as an example. You can find a relevant graph that compares supply voltage to execution speed on page 20 of this reference: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB002-110...
Blast from the past! If you think this kind of less traditional circuit design is cool, you should also check out some of the more recent stuff in low-power asynchronous architectures:
And if you want to get an asynchronous chip you can play around with today, check out the GA144 from Greenarrays. I believe this is currently the only commercially available asynchronous processor.
http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html
In the Portal 2 video game where the main character throws the erstwhile antagonist (now uneasy ally) GLaDOS computer "chip" into a potato, is that joke connected to this at all?
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[ 30.2 ms ] story [ 504 ms ] thread[0] - http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos
And today (November 2015), chips manufactured on 14 nanometer (0.014 micron) processes are shipping in volume.
Sadly, I've never had the chance to try these Potato chips.
More seriously, we've done this before. Old Usenet thread about asynchronous PDP-10s and PDP-6s:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.sys.pdp10/wqWlZQ...
http://vlsi.cornell.edu/research.php
https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/neurogrid.htm...
http://paulmerolla.com/merolla_main_som.pdf