The number of cycles per second in a processor clock, measured in Hertz (Hz). A processor running at 3 GHz completes 3 billion cycles per second.
Context
Clock frequency is one of the primary metrics for CPU performance. Higher clock frequency means more operations per second, but modern processors also rely on techniques like pipelining and parallelism. Clock frequency improvements have slowed due to power and thermal constraints, as described by Denard Scaling and Moore’s law.