Whats GHz and what does it do?

Question

Im learning things about computers.

Answer 1

GHz stands for giga hertz, is is a unit for measuring radio frequency....in this case, the frequency (speed) that a proccesor runs at.

Answer 2

gigahertz


DEFINITION -

The gigahertz, abbreviated GHz, is a unit of alternating current (AC) or electromagnetic (EM) wave frequency equal to one thousand million hertz (1,000,000,000 Hz). The gigahertz is used as an indicator of the frequency of ultra-high-frequency (UHF) and microwave EM signals and also, in some computers, to express microprocessor clock speed.

An EM signal having a frequency of 1 GHz has a wavelength of 300 millimeters, or a little less than a foot. An EM signal of 100 GHz has a wavelength of 3 millimeters, which is roughly 1/8 of an inch. Some radio transmissions are made at frequencies up to hundreds of gigahertz. Personal computer clock speeds are increasing month by month as the technology advances, and reached the 1 GHz point in March of 2000, with a processor from AMD, closely followed by a 1 GHz Pentium 3 from Intel.

Other commonly-used units of frequency are the kHz, equal to 1,000 Hz or 0.000001 GHz, and the MHz, equal to 1,000,000 Hz or 0.001 GHz.

LAST UPDATED: 27 Nov 2003

Read more about gigahertz:
- SharkyExtreme.com offers a hardware review of the 1 GHz Pentium III .

Answer 3

A Hertz is a cycle per second. So KHz are a thousand cycles per second, MHz a million, and GHz a billion.

It's kind of an abstract concept in the world of computing: yes it means something concrete, but for the home user's experience it lacks somewhat. Your 3.2GHz computer theoretically is 2x faster than your 1.6GHz computer according to the number of clock cycles but obviously clock cycle speeds aren't the only things involved by a wide margin.

Answer 4

GHz is an abreviation (acronym) for GigiHertz which means a Billion Cycles Per Second. GHz is a frequency, or quantity.
: Gigi or G is the preface for Billion, e.g. GB is GigiBytes, etc.
Typically, as Hz increases, so does cost! Now you're learning.

Answer 5

On billion cycles per second,, approximately. It is used to express things like clock speed of a cpu.

Answer 6

giga hertz