What is the system clock? Include definitions of the following terms in your response: clock cycle, superscalar, gigahertz, and hertz.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Student responses will vary, but should be drawn from the following information from the text.

The processor relies on a small quartz crystal circuit called the system clock to control the timing of all computer operations. Just as your heart beats at a regular rate to keep your body functioning, the system clock generates regular electronic pulses, or ticks, that set the operating pace of components of the system unit. Each tick equates to a clock cycle. Processors today typically are superscalar, which means they can execute more than one instruction per clock cycle. The pace of the system clock, called the clock speed, is measured by the number of ticks per second. Current personal computer processors have clock speeds in the gigahertz range. Giga is a prefix that stands for billion, and a hertz is one cycle per second. Thus, one gigahertz (GHz) equals one billion ticks of the system clock per second. A computer that operates at 3 GHz has 3 billion (giga) clock cycles in one second (hertz). The faster the clock speed, the more instructions the processor can execute per second. The speed of the system clock is just one factor that influences a computer's performance. Other factors include the type of processor chip, amount of cache, memory access time, bus width, and bus clock speed.