Tuesday, January 18, 2011

State the units of clock speed measurement

When people talk about a computer’s ‘speed’, they mean how fast it can process data. In other words, this means the speed the computer can turn data into information.

Every microprocessor contains a system clock. The system clock controls the speed of all the operations within a computer.

The speed of the clock in measured by how many cycles per second the clock makes.

MEGAHERTZ (MHz)

Mega is prefix that stands for million

Example à one computer that operates at 933 MHz has 933 million clock cycles in one second.

GIGAHERTZ (GHz)

Giga is prefix that stands for billion

1 GHz equal to one billion cycles of the system clock

For example, a microprocessor that runs at 200 GHz executes 200 billion cycles per second. This is what they a talking about if they say a computer is a 2.4 GHz machine. Its clock rate is 2.4 billion cycles per second.

In relation with megahertz, 1.0 GHz is equivalent to 1000 MHz

GHz is most often used as a measurement of a pc processor chip & power, with bigger numbers meaning more speed and higher price

Hertz & Second

The clock speed unit is measured in hertz.

1 Hertz = 121 cycle1 second"> 1 cycle / 1 second

1 Megahertz (MHz) = 1,000,000 cycles / 1 second 121,000,000 cycles1 second">

1 GHz = 1,000,000,000 cycles / 1 second 121,000,000,000 cycles1 second">

1 GHz = 1 000 MHz


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