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The clock rate of the first generation of computers was measured in hertz or kilohertz (kHz), the first personal computers (PCs) to arrive throughout the 1970s and 1980s had clock rates measured in megahertz (MHz), and in the 21st century the speed of modern CPUs is commonly advertised in gigahertz (GHz).
Common methods are reducing the clock speed along with the CPU voltage and sending parts of the processor into a sleep state. On processors that have a halt instruction that stops the CPU until an interrupt occurs, such as x86 's HLT instruction, it may save significant amounts of power and heat if the idle task consists of a loop which ...
Clock synchronization is a topic in computer science and engineering that aims to coordinate otherwise independent clocks. Even when initially set accurately, real clocks will differ after some amount of time due to clock drift , caused by clocks counting time at slightly different rates.
The purpose of overclocking is to increase the operating speed of a given component. [3] Normally, on modern systems, the target of overclocking is increasing the performance of a major chip or subsystem, such as the main processor or graphics controller, but other components, such as system memory or system buses (generally on the motherboard), are commonly involved.
[citation needed] The argument was that the IBM computer was five times faster than the Apple II, as its Intel 8088 processor had a clock speed roughly 4.7 times the clock speed of the MOS Technology 6502 used in the latter. However, what really matters is not how finely divided a machine's instructions are, but how long it takes to complete a ...
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What determines absolute latency (and thus system performance) is determined by both the timings and the memory clock frequency. When translating memory timings into actual latency, it is important to note that timings are in units of clock cycles, which for double data rate memory is half the speed of the commonly quoted transfer rate. Without ...
The naming convention for DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 modules specifies either a maximum speed (e.g., DDR2-800) or a maximum bandwidth (e.g., PC2-6400). The speed rating (800) is not the maximum clock speed, but twice that (because of the doubled data rate). The specified bandwidth (6400) is the maximum megabytes transferred per second using a 64-bit width.