Speakng of hardware, I recall there were some CPUs called... "Asynchronous Hyper 500Gqs" in the Onlink Laboratories server..

Something like that. The impression the description gives makes it sound like it works as a new CPU without replacing the old one. Is this right, or am I missing something?

The Asynchronous Streaming SIMD Extensions (ASSE) instruction set does not consist of any new instructions, as popular opinion would indicate. ASSE is a compilation of current instruction sets with a relatively minor twist: it does not obey any internal clocking mechanism.

The idea behind this was to allow instructions to complete as fast as they could, rather than be paced to other, slower ones. This used the original technology of the pre-emptive instruction handling, originally found in the first chips that met and subsequently broke the 200 GHz barrier. This allows instructions to execute without waiting for others to finish. While this produces only picoseconds of saved time, the speed improvement is clear if a computer is running billions, trillions, or quadrillions of instructions per second.

Chips with the ASSE set do not, naturally, have a true clock speed. However, for scaleability purposes, Uplink Laboratories has tested several models for a comparable speed using a worst case scenario. Naturally, customers will find their processors behaving much faster than the listed speed, as a worst case setting is uncommon and is not likely to remain for long.