Clock cycle

What is clock cycle?
In computers, the clock cycle is the time between two pulses from an oscillator. It is a single increment of the central processing unit (CPU) clock during which the smallest unit of processor activity is running. The clock cycle helps determine the speed of the CPU because it is viewed as the basic unit of measurement of how quickly an instruction can be executed by the computer processor.

A clock cycle is also known as a clock tick.

Early computer processors and CPUs used to execute one instruction per clock cycle. With advances in microprocessor technology, modern microprocessors such as. B. Superscalar, able to execute multiple instructions per clock cycle. Most CPU processes require multiple clock cycles because only simple instructions can be executed in each clock cycle. Load, store, jump, and fetch operations are common clock cycle activities.

The clock rate of a processor is measured in Hertz, which is clock cycles per second. A CPU that executes three billion clock cycles per second has a clock speed of 3 GHz.