If computer clocks max out somewhere around 5GHz, how is it possible for 100Gbit internet to exist? How does the computer possibly transfer that much data per second?

Question

If computer clocks max out somewhere around 5GHz, how is it possible for 100Gbit internet to exist? How does the computer possibly transfer that much data per second?

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Answer 1

5 GHz is a clock frequency. An electric signal can travel about 2 inches, about 4.5 centimeters, in each tick. That’s not much time for a signal to bounce around a computer chip. We can go just a little bit farther, but more frequent clock ticks are approaching the limit of electricity. We could go a little farther with the speed of light, but not much. It has nothing to do with how much data gets processed, only how often it gets processed.

Again, the clock frequency is not about how much data gets processed, merely how often processing takes a step. A modern, high-end CPU can handle several hundred terabits per second of data on the chip, with each tick representing an opportunity to process a batch of data.

100GbE is the amount of data in a signal. If you could watch the signal come through the wire, you’d see multiple frequencies of wiggles all going through the wire, and each one also has a volume. Each of those individual signals is sent for a very short time, you’d see it as only a couple inches/centimeters down the wire.

As a simple example, when you push a button on a phone you hear a tone, but it’s actually two tones at the same time. The keypad has 8 frequencies and they can encode 16 different key codes, although most phones only have 12 buttons. Networking uses many more frequencies to encode the data. Networking also uses volume (amplitude) to encode data, consider that a single frequency might have 10 different volume levels and so it could have the values 1-10. There is a very quick pulse putting together a symbol, much like an alphabet letter, by listening to all the frequencies and their amplitude. When you see a mark on the page it may be one of many different letters or numbers, or even symbols for other languages.

The symbols are the data going over the wire over many frequencies at once, like channels on the television. There are many million individual symbols going through the wire every second on many channel, each letter going through different frequencies, and each symbol can represent many bits. Even though the signaling rate is only a few billion per second, because each signal represents a more complex set of multiple letters, each letter can be combined into a more complex message, giving about 100 billion bits of information.