1. No, asynchronous means something different than multiple clocks. Think of it like the difference between polling based programming and using coroutines; with multiple clock domains you have separate sections of your chip performing tasks at predefined instants in time (when your clock signal rises/when your polling loop swings around again) but with a truly asynchronous design, you simply start processing the next chunk of work when the previous chunk is finished (when the previous chunk of logic drives a signal high/when the previous coroutine finishes and control flow resumes in your coroutine).
2. It does deliver some benefits, but not all. Truly clockless design is desirable in some cases due to power concerns; for example the Novelda Xethru ultra-wideband radar SoCs are actually clockless, because power distribution networks can account for 20%+ of the power consumed in chips like this. (This is what I've heard, I don't have a citation for this. The paper I quote below similarly handwaves and throws around numbers from 26% all the way up to 40%, but they don't do any analysis of their own on this)
I've never used a clockless CPU design before, but the theoretical advantages are listed out quite nicely in this paper [0], which lists (among other things) the natural ability for the CPU to sit at idle (not executing `NOP` instructions, actually idle) when no work is available. It appears that the AMULET 3 processor (which is compared against an ARM 9 core) is competitive in power consumption, but doesn't quite stand up in performance. While still pretty impressive for a research project, this shows that we do still have quite a bit of work to do before these chips are ruling the world (if, indeed, we can scale up our tools to the point that designing these isn't just an exercise in frustration).
2. It does deliver some benefits, but not all. Truly clockless design is desirable in some cases due to power concerns; for example the Novelda Xethru ultra-wideband radar SoCs are actually clockless, because power distribution networks can account for 20%+ of the power consumed in chips like this. (This is what I've heard, I don't have a citation for this. The paper I quote below similarly handwaves and throws around numbers from 26% all the way up to 40%, but they don't do any analysis of their own on this)
I've never used a clockless CPU design before, but the theoretical advantages are listed out quite nicely in this paper [0], which lists (among other things) the natural ability for the CPU to sit at idle (not executing `NOP` instructions, actually idle) when no work is available. It appears that the AMULET 3 processor (which is compared against an ARM 9 core) is competitive in power consumption, but doesn't quite stand up in performance. While still pretty impressive for a research project, this shows that we do still have quite a bit of work to do before these chips are ruling the world (if, indeed, we can scale up our tools to the point that designing these isn't just an exercise in frustration).
[0]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83....