What is Clock Speed?

A CPU‘s (or GPU’s) clock speed shows how many instructions it can process in a second and serves as a general measure of speed. With each subsequent generation, CPU clock speeds increased dramatically from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Clock speed improvements, however, hit a wall because of increased power use and additional heat production. Here, manufacturers discovered that improving CPUs in other ways was more cost-effective, to the point that a modern processor can typically outperform any old processor that has a higher clock speed.

Clock speeds are usually shown in GHz, so a CPU with a 2.8GHz clock speed can execute 2.8 billion cycles every second (2.8 MHz would be 2.8 million cycles every cycle).

An internal oscillator synchronizes a pulse into a “cycle.” The CPU contains billions of transistors that open and close during each cycle.

Depending on what the instruction is, an instruction can take more than one clock cycle to be executed while sometimes, more than one instruction might be executed in a single clock cycle. So it is strongly recommended to compare clock speeds with CPU’s of the same brand and generation due to the fact that every CPU executes instructions differently.

A CPU’s or GPU’s clock speed can be increased via overclocking, however it does take a toll on your components lifespan.