Difference Between System Clock and Hardware Clock

System Clock vs Hardware Clock

Summary: Difference Between System Clock and Hardware Clock is that the processor relies on a small quartz crystal circuit called the system clock to control the timing of all computer operations. While in Linux we are actually having two types of clocks and these are RTC Clock or Real Time Clock and CMOS Clock or Hardware Clock. Hardware Clocks are just signals that control the Digital Electronics.

System Clock

The processor relies on a small quartz crystal circuit called the system clock to control the timing of all computer operations. Just as your heart beats at a regular rate to keep your body functioning, the system clock generates regular electronic pulses, or ticks, that set the operating pace of components of the system unit. The pace of the system clock, called the clock speed, is measured by the number of ticks per second.

Current personal computer processors have clock speeds in the gigahertz range. Giga is a prefix that stands for billion, and a hertz is one cycle per second. Thus, one gigahertz (GHz) equals one billion ticks of the system clock per second. A computer that operates at 3 GHz has 3 billion (giga) clock cycles in one second (hertz). The faster the clock speed, the more instructions the processor can execute per second. The speed of the system clock is just one factor that influences a computer’s performance. Other factors, such as the type of processor chip, amount of cache, memory access time, bus width, and bus clock speed.

Hardware Clock

In Linux we are actually having two types of clocks and these are RTC Clock or Real Time Clock and CMOS Clock or Hardware Clock. Hardware Clocks are just signals that control the Digital Electronics. And no like RTC Clock, hardware clocks does not count time especially understandable by humans.

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