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clock rate
(redirected from CPU clock)

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clock rate

Frequency of a computer's internal electronic clock. Every computer contains an electronic clock, which produces a sequence of regular electrical pulses used by the control unit to synchronize the components of the computer and regulate the fetch–execute cycle by which program instructions are processed.

A fixed number of time pulses is required in order to execute each particular instruction. The speed at which a computer can process instructions therefore depends on the clock rate: increasing the clock rate will decrease the time required to complete each particular instruction.

Clock rates are measured in megahertz (MHz), or millions of pulses a second. Microcomputers commonly have a clock rate of 8–100 MHz. The overall performance of a microcomputer depends on many factors in addition to the clock rate.



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For example, the 16-bit asynchronous event counter (AEC) can be used to count input pulse even when the CPU clocks are turned off.
Over a similar timeframe, advances in silicon technology, driven by Moore's Law, have allowed the CPU clock frequency in the average PC to increase from roughly 25MHz to 2.
FSMLabs' RTLinuxPro and RTCoreBSD meet requirements for low-latency hard real-time responsiveness without sensitivity to application load for a wide range of CPU clock rates.
 
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