what are GHz

[realaton]

what are gigahertz and what do they do?

[MoonlightSylv]

3 minutes ago, realaton said:

what are gigahertz and what do they do?

They are basically the speed of a CPU/GPU.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, realaton said:

what are gigahertz and what do they do?

A hertz (Hz) is basically a clock cycle for processors. One hertz is one clock cycle in one second. A gigahertz is using the metric prefix giga, meaning a billion. So in essence, one gigahertz equals one billion clock cycles a second. There's a neat explanation on Wikipedia that does a lot better job then I just did.

[adams]

1000MHz = 1GHz

[Enderman]

ghz = billion cycles per second

[vanished]

It's the frequency of your processor.  In very simple terms, it's how many things it can do per second (but please note that there are many more factors to this)

[rtpb5642]

9 minutes ago, realaton said:

what are gigahertz and what do they do?

one hz is a calculation, so at 5ghz your CPU is doing 5 million calculations per second.

[Savir]

17 minutes ago, rtpb5642 said:

one hz is a calculation, so at 5ghz your CPU is doing 5 million calculations per second.

5 "billion" calculations per second

[Glenwing]

4 minutes ago, realaton said:

what are gigahertz and what do they do?

CPUs perform mathematical operations in a series of steps. Each time the CPU does one step, we call that a cycle. CPU frequency (measured in GHz) is how many cycles the CPU can do in one second. 1 gigahertz is 1 billion cycles per second.

 

It is not a measure of CPU speed or computational power, because different CPUs take a different number of steps to do the same operation. On more advanced CPU designs which take fewer steps to do the same calculations, it will be able to finish more calculations with 1 billion cycles than a less advanced CPU would, and so even if both CPUs are operating at 1 billion cycles per second, the more advanced CPU will have higher performance because it gets more stuff done with those 1 billion cycles than the other CPU does.