how does a monitoring software know the clock speed, data transfert etc. of components at any given time (CPU/GPU/disk/…)?
In: Technology
Computer clock ticks are generated from pizoelectric crystals which are crystal chips that will oscillate with at a very precise and known frequency when a DC voltage (from your power supply) is applied to them. The wave that comes off the crystal is then rectified into whatever form is necessary to drive discrete clock ticks of your CPU and other devices on your motherboard and there are various techniques where a low frequency wave from such a crystal can be frequency scaled multiple times to get higher frequencies. This is usually all defined by settings in your BIOS and your CPU knows what frequency its being fed. Thus it knows how many of its incoming clock ticks per second there are, and that’s how it keeps time.
Interestingly clocks in schools and factories etc. do exactly the same thing but directly from the AC signals of the power system. You can tell your power is not ideal when your clocks start lagging. i.e. if you’re on a 60 Hz system but your clocks always lag by a few seconds would mean you’re really only getting 59.whatever Hz.
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