For example, a transistor sends current to represent two 1’s. How does the hardware know that it’s two 1’s and not one or three? That current exists for a certain amount of time, so how does the hardware time it so that it knows when to separate the constant current into the correct amount of bits, and what is that timing? Or is it not timing at all, but a total sum of current it receives before counting one bit then resetting and waiting for the current to reach that sum again to count another bit? But then, how does it count 0’s if there is no current? Surely that would have to involve some sort of timing? If there is two seconds of no current, how many 0’s is that?
Hopefully I have explained my inquiry sufficiently.
In: Technology
It uses some sort of physical device to keep track of time like an oscillating crystal. Your CPU uses that to time how often it will actually cycle and run an instruction.
You’ve probably heard the term *overclocking* before. A couple pins coming into and going out of the chip are the *clock cycle*, which do exactly what you’re asking about. All they do, all the time, is alternate between 0 and 1. That clock cycle sets the speed for every other signal coming in. That’s what the chip compares against to know that it’s two 1s and not one long 1.
Overclocking, as the name suggests, means speeding up that clock cycle so the chip processes more quickly. That also uses more energy and produces more heat.
There are many contexts in which hardware uses 1’s and 0’s and, especially if we include older defunct solutions, the answer to your question becomes *many answers*.
For common stuff like a processor or graphics card, there exists a clock. This clock simply jumps between “on” and “off” at a regular speed – the clock rate. This clock tells all of the other components when to move on to the next step; the clock tells it that enough time has passed to start the next thing it’s supposed to do.
For a 3 GHz processor, one second of zero is 3,000,000,000 zeros. Or, if it uses both clock states to step, then 6,000,000,000.
This is the clock speed you always hear about. Plus, processors don’t load one stream of 1 and 0. They pull whole blocks of 1 and 0 at the same time. For example, you want to store a 32-bit value in the CPU’s register. You issue one command that does that all at once in one clock cycle. The data paths are like a very wide highway, not a one-lane country road. The blocks of bits move in chunks every clock cycle.
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