What does gigahertz mean

Statistics for gigahertz Look-up Popularity. Style: MLA. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Love words? Need even more definitions? Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms The same, but different. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs. What Is 'Semantic Bleaching'? One clock cycle lasts only 1 nanosecond and toggles between 0 and 1.

Modern and non-embedded CPUs may have a single clock cycle of less than 1 nanosecond. CPU megahertz usually refers to clock rate, frequency or speed. Clock rate is gauged by a crystal oscillator which generates highly accurate and unwavering electrical and clock signals, stabilizes receivers and frequencies, and tracks time.

The oscillator circuit brings its crystal a small amount of electricity every nanosecond, which is measured in hertz. By: Justin Stoltzfus Contributor, Reviewer. By: Satish Balakrishnan. Dictionary Dictionary Term of the Day. Natural Language Processing. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us. Sign up. Term of the Day. One of the most frequently touted measures of processor performance is a given chip's speed in gigahertz. Processors with higher GHz ratings can, theoretically, do more in a given unit of time than processors with lower GHz ratings.

However, the processor's speed rating is just one of many factors that impact how fast it actually processes data. Given that some specialized applications can be very computationally demanding, choosing the fastest computer is more important than buying a machine with the highest clock speed.

Processors work according to a clock that beats a set number of times per second, usually measured in gigahertz. For instance, a 3. Each clock beat represents an opportunity for the processor to manipulate a number of bits equivalent to its capacity -- bit processors can work on 64 bits at a time, while bit processors work on 32 bits at a time.

The clock that usually gets included in marketing materials is the internal clock, but a processor also has an external clock that determines how quickly the processor can communicate with the outside world. The internal clock represents how quickly the processor can manipulate the data it already has, while the external clock specifies how quickly it can read the information it needs to manipulate or how quickly it can output the manipulated data. As of the date of publication, external clocks are frequently significantly slower than internal clocks.