In computing, the clock rate typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses, which are used to synchronize the operations of its components,[1] 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).
The clock rate of the first generation of computers was measured in hertz or kilohertz (kHz), the first personal computers (PCs) to arrive throughout the 1970s and 1980s had clock rates measured in megahertz (MHz), and in the 21st century the speed of modern CPUs is commonly advertised in gigahertz (GHz). This metric is most useful when comparing processors within the same family, holding constant other features that may affect performance. Video card and CPU manufacturers commonly select their highest performing units from a manufacturing batch and set their maximum clock rate higher, fetching a higher price.[citation needed]
Determining factors[edit]
528 Hz DNA repair: 528Hz is essential to the geometry of circles and spirals consistent with DNA structuring and hydrosonic restructuring. Evidence suggests that 528 Hz has the potential to positively affect cellular water clusters to assist in removing impurities to prevent sickness and disease. Sep 30, 2020 The benefits resulting from the syntonization of our brain to Earth’s frequency of vibration include recharging our body’s batteries. We can notice the disappearance of worries and unnecessary anxieties, increased vitality, a state of well-being, and kindness. We can also perceive how our consciousness is connected to a huge source of energy.
Binning[edit]
Manufacturers of modern processors typically charge premium prices for processors that operate at higher clock rates, a practice called binning. For a given CPU, the clock rates are determined at the end of the manufacturing process through actual testing of each processor. Chip manufacturers publish a 'maximum clock rate' specification, and they test chips before selling them to make sure they meet that specification, even when executing the most complicated instructions with the data patterns that take the longest to settle (testing at the temperature and voltage that runs the lowest performance). Processors successfully tested for compliance with a given set of standards may be labeled with a higher clock rate, e.g., 3.50 GHz, while those that fail the standards of the higher clock rate yet pass the standards of a lesser clock rate may be labeled with the lesser clock rate, e.g., 3.3 GHz, and sold at a lower price.[2]
Engineering[edit]
The clock rate of a CPU is normally determined by the frequency of an oscillator crystal. Typically a crystal oscillator produces a fixed sine wave—the frequency reference signal. Electronic circuitry translates that into a square wave at the same frequency for digital electronics applications (or, in using a CPU multiplier, some fixed multiple of the crystal reference frequency). The clock distribution network inside the CPU carries that clock signal to all the parts that need it. An A/D Converter has a 'clock' pin driven by a similar system to set the sampling rate. With any particular CPU, replacing the crystal with another crystal that oscillates at half the frequency ('underclocking') will generally make the CPU run at half the performance and reduce waste heat produced by the CPU. Conversely, some people try to increase performance of a CPU by replacing the oscillator crystal with a higher frequency crystal ('overclocking').[3] However, the amount of overclocking is limited by the time for the CPU to settle after each pulse, and by the extra heat created.
After each clock pulse, the signal lines inside the CPU need time to settle to their new state. That is, every signal line must finish transitioning from 0 to 1, or from 1 to 0. If the next clock pulse comes before that, the results will be incorrect. In the process of transitioning, some energy is wasted as heat (mostly inside the driving transistors). When executing complicated instructions that cause many transitions, the higher the clock rate the more heat produced. Transistors may be damaged by excessive heat.
There is also a lower limit of the clock rate, unless a fully static core is used.
Historical milestones and current records[edit]
The first fully mechanical analog computer, the Z1 operated clock frequency at 1 Hz (cycle per second) clock frequency and the first electromechanical general purpose computer, the Z3, operated at a frequency of about 5–10 Hz. The first electronic general purpose computer, the ENIAC, used a 100 kHz clock in its cycling unit. As each instruction took 20 cycles, it had an instruction rate of 5 kHz.
The first commercial PC, the Altair 8800 (by MITS), used an Intel 8080 CPU with a clock rate of 2 MHz (2 million cycles per second). The original IBM PC (c. 1981) had a clock rate of 4.77 MHz (4,772,727 cycles per second).In 1992, both Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation broke the difficult 100 MHz limit with RISC techniques in the PA-7100 and AXP 21064 DEC Alpha respectively. In 1995, Intel'sP5Pentium chip ran at 100 MHz (100 million cycles per second). On March 6, 2000, AMD reached the 1 GHz milestone a few months ahead of Intel. In 2002, an Intel Pentium 4 model was introduced as the first CPU with a clock rate of 3 GHz (three billion cycles per second corresponding to ~ 0.33 nanoseconds per cycle). Since then, the clock rate of production processors has increased much more slowly, with performance improvements coming from other design changes.
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As of 2014, the Guinness World Record for the highest CPU clock rate is an overclocked, 8.723 GHz AMD Piledriver-based FX-8370 chip. It surpassed the previous record achieved in 2011, an 8.429 GHz AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer-based chip.[4]
![Benefits Benefits](/uploads/1/1/9/8/119876292/254478819.jpg)
As of mid-2013, the highest clock rate on a production processor is the IBM zEC12, clocked at 5.5 GHz, which was released in August 2012.
Research[edit]
Engineers continue to find new ways to design CPUs that settle a little more quickly or use slightly less energy per transition, pushing back those limits, producing new CPUs that can run at slightly higher clock rates. The ultimate limits to energy per transition are explored in reversible computing.
The first fully reversible CPU, the Pendulum, was implemented using standard CMOS transistors in the late 1990s at MIT.[5][6][7][8]
Engineers also continue to find new ways to design CPUs so that they complete more instructions per clock cycle, thus achieving a lower CPI (cycles or clock cycles per instruction) count, although they may run at the same or a lower clock rate as older CPUs. This is achieved through architectural techniques such as instruction pipelining and out-of-order execution which attempts to exploit instruction level parallelism in the code.
IBM is working on 100 GHz CPU. In 2010, IBM demonstrated a graphene based transistor that can execute 100 billion cycles per second.[9]
Comparing[edit]
The clock rate of a CPU is most useful for providing comparisons between CPUs in the same family. The clock rate is only one of several factors that can influence performance when comparing processors in different families. For example, an IBM PC with an Intel 80486CPU running at 50 MHz will be about twice as fast (internally only) as one with the same CPU and memory running at 25 MHz, while the same will not be true for MIPS R4000 running at the same clock rate as the two are different processors that implement different architectures and microarchitectures. Further, a 'cumulative clock rate' measure is sometimes assumed by taking the total cores and multiplying by the total clock rate (e.g. dual core 2.8 GHz being considered processor cumulative 5.6 GHz). There are many other factors to consider when comparing the performance of CPUs, like the width of the CPU's data bus, the latency of the memory, and the cache architecture.
The clock rate alone is generally considered to be an inaccurate measure of performance when comparing different CPUs families. Software benchmarks are more useful. Clock rates can sometimes be misleading since the amount of work different CPUs can do in one cycle varies. For example, superscalar processors can execute more than one instruction per cycle (on average), yet it is not uncommon for them to do 'less' in a clock cycle. In addition, subscalar CPUs or use of parallelism can also affect the performance of the computer regardless of clock rate.
See also[edit]
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References[edit]
- ^http://foldoc.org/Clock
- ^
- ^Soderstrom, Thomas. 'Overclocking Guide Part 1: Risks, Choices and Benefits : Who Overclocks?'.
'Overclocking' early processors was as simple – and as limited – as changing the discrete clock crystal ... The advent of adjustable clock generators has allowed 'overclocking' to be done without changing parts such as the clock crystal.
- ^Chiappetta, Marco (23 September 2011). 'AMD Breaks 8 GHz Overclock with Upcoming FX Processor, Sets World Record. The record has been surpassed with 8794 MHz of overclocking with AMD FX 8350'. HotHardware. Retrieved 2012-04-28.
- ^Michael Frank.'RevComp - The Reversible and Quantum Computing Research Group'.
- ^Michael Swaine.'Backward to the Future'.Dr. Dobb's Journal.2004.
- ^Michael P. Frank.'Reversible Computing: A Requirement for Extreme Supercomputing'.
- ^Matthew Arthur Morrison.'Theory, Synthesis, and Application of Adiabatic and Reversible Logic Circuits For Security Applications'.2014.
- ^'IBM Details World's Fastest Graphene Transistor'. PCWorld. 2010-02-05. Retrieved 2019-04-23.
This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the 'relicensing' terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Clock_rate&oldid=992819968'
by Brian Dunning
Filed under Environment, General Science, Health
Skeptoid Podcast #352
March 5, 2013
Podcast transcript | Subscribe
Also available in Russian
March 5, 2013
Podcast transcript | Subscribe
Also available in Russian
Listen:
https://skeptoid.com/audio/skeptoid-4352.mp3
https://skeptoid.com/audio/skeptoid-4352.mp3
It's increasingly hard to find a web page dedicated to the sales of alternative medicine products or New Age spirituality that does not cite the Schumann resonances as proof that some product or service is rooted in science. This mysterious number of 7.83 comes up again and again in sales pitches, as a sort of miracle frequency that can bring you health and wellness. Today we're going to see what the Schumann resonances actually are, how they formed and what they do, and see if we can determine whether they are, in fact, related to human health.
In a nutshell, the Schumann resonances are the name given to the resonant frequency of the Earth's atmosphere, between the surface and the densest part of the ionosphere. They're named for the German physicist Winfried Otto Schumann (1888-1974) who worked briefly in the United States after WWII, and predicted that the Earth's atmosphere would resonate certain electromagnetic frequencies. The closed space inside a bottle has a resonant frequency which becomes audible when you blow across it:
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
This particular bottle has a resonant frequency of about 196 Hz. That's the frequency of sound waves that most efficiently bounce back and forth between the sides of the bottle, at the speed of sound, propagating via the air molecules. Electromagnetic radiation is similar, except the waves travel at the speed of light, and do not require a medium like air molecules. The speed of light is a lot faster than the speed of sound, but the electromagnetic waves have a lot further to go between the ground and the ionosphere than do the sound waves between the sides of the bottle. This atmospheric electromagnetic resonant frequency is 7.83 Hz, which is near the bottom of the ELF frequency range, or Extremely Low Frequency. The atmosphere has its own radio equivalent of someone blowing across the top of the bottle: lightning. Lightning is constantly flashing all around the world, many times per second; and each bolt is a radio source. This means our atmosphere is continuously resonating with a radio frequency of 7.83 Hz, along with progressively weaker harmonics at 14.3, 20.8, 27.3 and 33.8 Hz. These are the Schumann resonances. It's nothing to do with the Earth itself, or with life, or with any spiritual phenomenon; it's merely an artifact of the physical dimensions of the space between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere. Every planet and moon that has an ionosphere has its own set of Schumann resonances defined by the planet's size.
The amount of resonance fluctuates as the ionosphere becomes more or less dense, which depends largely on the amount of solar radiation striking it. At night, that part of the ionosphere that's in the Earth's shadow thins out. Another influence is that the world's three lightning hotspots — Asia, Africa, and South America — also follow a day/night cycle, and are seasonal as well. Thus, the peaks of radio signal strength at the Schumann resonance follow a constantly shifting, but reasonably predictable, schedule.
A very important point to be aware of is that this resonated radio from lightning is a vanishingly small component of the electromagnetic spectrum to which we're all naturally exposed. The overwhelming source is the sun, blasting the Earth with infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet radiation. All natural sources from outer space, and even radioactive decay of naturally occuring elements on Earth, produce wide-spectrum radio noise. Those resonating in the Schumann cavity are only a tiny, tiny part of the spectrum.
Nevertheless, because the Schumann resonance frequencies are defined by the dimensions of the Earth, many New Age proponents and alternative medicine advocates have come to regard 7.83 Hz as some sort of Mother Earth frequency, asserting the belief that it's related to life on Earth, despite its being so tiny and lost among all the other, stronger parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Often we find that New Age beliefs are often based more on what seems emotionally satisfying than on sound science.
The most pervasive of all the popular fictions surrounding the Schumann resonance is that it is correlated with the health of the human body. There are a huge number of products and services sold to enhance health or mood, citing the Schumann resonance as the foundational science. Before looking at some of these claims in detail, it's noteworthy that neither Schumann resonances, electromagnetic radiation, or the Earth's ionosphere are mentioned in any medical or anatomical textbooks. There is no detectable or theoretically predicted relationship between either ELF radio or the number 7.83 and the health of human body. But let's look at some of the claims.
Many marketers of jewelry that claims to provide health or sports performance benefits cite the Schumann resonance as the science behind their claim. A notable example is the Power Balance bracelets. Tom O'Dowd, formerly the Australian distributor, said that the mylar hologram resonated at 7.83 Hz. When the bracelet was placed within the body's natural energy field, the resonance would 'reset' your energy field to that frequency. Well, there were a lot of problems with that claim. First of all, 7.83 Hz has a wavelength of about 38,000 kilometers. This is about the circumference of the Earth, which is why its atmospheric cavity resonates at that frequency. 38,000 kilometers is just a little bit bigger than a 1 or 2cm hologram; there's no way that something that tiny could resonate such an enormous wavelength. O'Dowd's sales pitch was implausible, by a factor of billions, to anyone who understood resonance.
This same fact also applies to the human body. Human beings are so small, relative to a radio wavelength of 38,000 kilometers, that there's no way our anatomy could detect or interact with such a radio signal in any way.
Proponents of binaural beats cite the Schumann frequency as well. These are audio recordings which combine two slightly offset frequencies to produce a third phantom beat frequency that is perceived from the interference of the two. Here is a common binaural beat recording that produces a beat frequency of 7.83 Hz:
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
Claims for how this benefits the body are diverse, but most either say something generally similar to what O'Dowd said, or they would claim to change your brain's encephalogram, which they say is a beneficial thing to do. Brain waves, the fluctuations of current in the brain as measured at the scalp by an electroencephalogram, can range from near zero up to about 100 Hz during normal activity, with a typical reading near the lower end of the scale. This happens to overlap 7.83 — suggesting the aforementioned pseudoscientific connection between humans and the Schumann resonance — but with a critical difference. An audio recording is audio, not radio. It's the physical oscillation of air molecules, not the propagation of electromagnetic waves. The two have virtually nothing to do with each other. Audio waves do not affect radio waves, and vice versa. So by no science that's understood would we expect an audio tone to cause a brain's activity to change its frequency to match.
There's a complete Skeptoid episode on binaural beats that addresses the claims in greater detail, and examines some of the research done.
I found one website, EarthCalm.ca (just as one example among many), that says:
Scientific research has recently determined how the human body receives and uses the important information from the Earth's field: 7 billion crystalline magnetites in the human brain, in addition to DNA and the pineal gland are meant to receive guiding information from the band of electromagnetic frequencies that extends from the Earth's crust to the ionosphere (Schumann Resonances). Today, the Earth's field is polluted with man-made frequencies, so the human body instead receives 'junk' produced by AC electricity and wireless technology.
Variations on this specific claim are fairly ubiquitous, that our bodies' energy fields need to interact with the Schumann resonance but can't because of all the interference from modern society. It's all complete and utter nonsense. Human bodies do not have an energy field, in fact there's not even any such thing as an energy field. Fields are constructs in which some direction or intensity is measured at every point: gravity, wind, magnetism, some expression of energy. Energy is just a measurement; it doesn't exist on its own as a cloud or a field or some other entity. The notion that frequencies can interact with the body's energy field is, as the saying goes, so wrong it's not even wrong.
Another really common New Age misconception about the Schumann resonance is that it is the resonant frequency of the Earth. This is also completely wrong. Take another listen to blowing across the bottle:
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
The space inside the bottle resonates at 196 Hz, a G on the musical scale. But listen when I tap the bottle itself:
Your browser does not support the audio tag.
![Benefits Benefits](/uploads/1/1/9/8/119876292/652184270.png)
The resonant frequency of the glass bottle itself is about 3520 Hz, which is an A on the musical scale. Two completely different notes. That's because the bottle and the space inside are two different things, with not necessarily any relationship between them. Similarly, there's no reason to expect the Earth's electromagnetic resonant frequency to bear any similarity to the Schumann resonance. But, furthermore, the Earth probably doesn't even have a resonant electromagnetic frequency. Each of the Earth's many layers is a very poor conductor of radio; combined all together, the Earth easily absorbs just about every frequency it's exposed to. If you've ever noticed that your car radio cuts out when you drive through a tunnel, you've seen an example of this.
Now the Earth does, of course, conduct low-frequency waves of other types. Earthquakes are the prime example of this. The Earth's various layers propagate seismic waves differently, but all quite well. Seismic waves are shockwaves, a physical oscillation of the medium. Like audio waves, these are unrelated to electromagnetic radio waves. Each and every major structure within the Earth — such as a mass of rock within a continent, a particular layer of magma, etc. — does have its own resonant frequency for seismic shockwaves, but there is (definitively) no resonant electromagnetic frequency for the Earth as a whole.
So our major point today is that you should be very skeptical of any product, service, article, website, or merchant who uses the Schumann resonance, in any way, as part of a sales pitch. The Earth does not have any particular frequency. Life on Earth is neither dependent upon, nor enhanced by, any specific frequency. Most of these sales pitches are what we in the brotherhood like to call a Word Salad, sciencey-sounding language thrown together in such a way as to sound impressive to the layperson. There's plenty of sciencey goodness in understanding why and what the Schumann resonances actually are, without co-opting them to promote nonsense.
Correction: An earlier version of this incorrectly described 196 Hz as the speed at which the waves bounce back and forth between the sides of the bottle, which is wrong.
Correction: An earlier version also stated that electromagnetic waves propagate via electrons, which was an ill-conceived 'journalist's shortcut.' Electromagnetic waves do not require that electrons be present.
By Brian Dunning
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Cite this article:
Dunning, B. 'Facts and Fiction of the Schumann Resonance.' Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, 5 Mar 2013. Web. 12 Dec 2020. <https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4352>
Dunning, B. 'Facts and Fiction of the Schumann Resonance.' Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, 5 Mar 2013. Web. 12 Dec 2020. <https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4352>
References & Further Reading
33 Hz Benefits Meaning
Editors. 'How Radio Communication Works.' National Radio Astronomy Observatory. National Science Foundation, 17 Aug. 2008. Web. 2 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nrao.edu/index.php/learn/radioastronomy/radiocommunication>
Kruszelnicki, K. 'Sceptics, energy fields and busting myths.' Dr. Karl on Triple J. ABC, 25 Nov. 2010. Web. 2 Mar. 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/science/audio/2010/11/25/3076448.htm>
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Nickolaenko, A., Hayakawa, M. Resonances in the Earth–ionosphere cavity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.
Pechony, O., Price, C. 'Schumann resonance parameters calculated with a partially uniform knee model on Earth, Venus, Mars, and Titan.' Radio Science. 9 Oct. 2004, Volume 39, Number 5.
Rakov, V. Lightning: Physics and Effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Shelikoff, M. 'Ask the Experts.' Physics and Astronomy Online. PhysLink.com, 15 Nov. 2001. Web. 2 Mar. 2013. <http://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae175.cfm>
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