What Is A Clock Frequency

[MasterLow]

Hi Im filling out a form and its asking for my computer specs, 

CPU: AMD

AMOUNT OF PROCESSOR CORES: 6

CLOCK FREQUENCYL:

GeForce GTX 1060

The one that says clock frequency? I'm having trouble finding what mine is  can someone please help me out?

[shadowbyte]

it's how many Ghz your CPU is running at (ex. 4.5ghz)

[NTDaws]

The clock rate typically refers to the frequency at which a chip like a central processing unit (CPU), one core of a multi-core processor, is running and is used as an indicator of the processor's speed. It is measured in clock cycles per second or its equivalent, the SI unit hertz (Hz).

[MasterLow]

1 minute ago, shadowbyte said:

it's how many Ghz your CPU is running at (ex. 4.5ghz)

Ok so mine is running at 3.5 and can be overclocked to 4.1 (I will keep it at 3.5 though)

It has a list of options, 1000 and over, 2000 and over, 3000 and over and 4000 and over, Which one do i ch0ose????

[Wolther]

For CPU you don't just say AMD. You need to say the full name of your cpu. 

[shadowbyte]

 

1 minute ago, MasterLow said:

Ok so mine is running at 3.5 and can be overclocked to 4.1 (I will keep it at 3.5 though)

It has a list of options, 1000 and over, 2000 and over, 3000 and over and 4000 and over, Which one do i ch0ose????

3000 and over

because 3.5 ghz is 3500mhz

[Wolther]

1 minute ago, MasterLow said:

Ok so mine is running at 3.5 and can be overclocked to 4.1 (I will keep it at 3.5 though)

It has a list of options, 1000 and over, 2000 and over, 3000 and over and 4000 and over, Which one do i ch0ose????

3k 

What is this for anyways? 

[MasterLow]

1 minute ago, shadowbyte said:

 

3000 and over

because 3.5 ghz is 3500mhz

Ok thank you very much, everything else I got and understood but this was a bit confusing as i havn't seen anything worded like this before 

 

[MasterLow]

1 minute ago, Wolther said:

3k 

What is this for anyways? 

Can't go into specifics sorry as the company I'm doing this for has asked me not to reveal anything about this project without their permissions, Sorry! and thanks for the help!!!

[Wolther]

1 minute ago, MasterLow said:

Can't go into specifics sorry as the company I'm doing this for has asked me not to reveal anything about this project without their permissions, Sorry! and thanks for the help!!!

Okay  and no problem 

[ARikozuM]

For a CPU, it's the amount of transitions the transistors can go through in one [cycle].

[Wolther]

5 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

For a CPU, it's the amount of transitions the transistors can go through in one second.

Is that another way of saying amount of clocks the transistors go through per second? 

[ARikozuM]

1 minute ago, Wolther said:

Isn't that another way of saying amount of clocks the transistors go through per second? 

There's no such thing as a clock.

[Wolther]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

There's no such thing as a clock.

IPC? instructions per clock. I always thought the frequency was amount of clocks in a given time and the instructions were the amount of transistors. I guess I don't know as much as I should about it 

[FPSwithaWacomTablet]

Look up synchronous computing

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_signal

[Sniperfox47]

5 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

For a CPU, it's the amount of transitions the transistors can go through in one second.

Not really. Some transistors can switch more than one time per clock cycle.

 

To be more clear, it's the number of times your CPU is able to, in a perfect world, process an instruction per second. 

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

There's no such thing as a clock.

Yes there is... There's a quartz crystal clock that creates the clock signal to synchronize the rest of the CPU...

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

For a CPU, it's the amount of transitions the transistors can go through in one second.

not really

[Wolther]

3 minutes ago, rrubberr said:

Instructions are the amount of instructions, frequency is worthless these days.

This thread is confusing me now. 1s and 0s are instructions, right? I always thought transistors provided a 1 or 0 output based on the way they're orientated. If not, what provides the instruction?   

[ARikozuM]

13 minutes ago, Wolther said:

IPC? instructions per clock. I always thought the frequency was amount of clocks in a given time and the instructions were the amount of transistors. I guess I don't know as much as I should about it 

Clock refers to time. One [cycle], in this case. IPC isn't used in every case. IPC for a CPU could be 1 per Hz for every instruction yet it wouldn't mean that it is perfect due to those instruction sets needing to be programmed for.

[ARikozuM]

1 minute ago, Wolther said:

This thread is confusing me now. 1s and 0s are instructions, right? I always thought transistors provided a 1 or 0 output based on the way they're orientated. If not, what provides the instruction?   

Instruction sets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_instruction_sets#Intel

[Sniperfox47]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

Clock refers to time. One second, in this case. IPC isn't used in every case. IPC for a CPU could be 1 per Hz for every instruction yet it wouldn't mean that it is perfect due to those instruction sets needing to be programmed for.

No... It really doesn't... Clock refers to one clock cycle as directed by the clock cycle generator that synchronizes all of the internals of your CPU...

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, rrubberr said:

Instructions require many ones and zeros. Again, Frequency does not matter at all these days.

Clock speed still matters. Getting more of those instructions done will always be beneficial in single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads.

[Sniperfox47]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

Clock speed still matters. Getting more of those instructions done will always be beneficial in single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads.

Clock speed is largely irrelevant for anyone other than gamers... A lot of complex, performance heavy instructions are offloaded to the GPU or processed in alternate instruction sets like SSE at this point, making the CPU clock speed completely irrelevant to them.

[ARikozuM]

1 minute ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Clock speed is largely irrelevant for anyone other than gamers...

Therefore it still matters. Would you buy a 1GHz CPU with the IPC of Skylake?

[Sniperfox47]

5 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Therefore it still matters. Would you buy a 1GHz CPU with the IPC of Skylake?

Yes. My raspberry Pi has that's about that.