The Numbers, Please
Think of the clock rate of a computer as the rate it executes instructions, that is, how many Fetch/Execute cycles it can complete in a second (modern computers are very complex and can complete more than one instruction per cycle)
hertz measures “cycles per second”
100MHz, specifies “100 million cycles per second”
A higher clock rate may not result in a faster running
program, because the speed may be limited by other
parts of the computer besides instruction execution
rate; the speed of getting an instruction’s data is often
a limitation that worsens with a faster clock