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?

In: 591

Answer 1

It’s not like the CPU can only do a single mathematical operation per clock cycle, there are multiple CPU cores and each core is executing several instructions in parallel and out of order. The instructions are also broken into smaller operations so you might have hundreds/thousands instructions “in flight” at any given moment.