Basic electronic Signaling, Clocking on CPU
Continuous Signal / Analog Continuous Signal
A Continuous Signal is a signal in which the signal can take continuous values in both amplitude axis as well as time axis.
Oscillator : is an electronic circuit that produces a periodic, oscillating electronic signal, often a sine wave or a square wave or a triangle wave
Amplitude : distance between the resting position and the maximum displacement of the wave
Frequency (f) : number of waves passing by a specific point per second, unit measurement of frequency is hertz (Hz), for example CPU 1 Gb (Hz) means in 1 second will have 1000.000.000 Hz.
Period (T) : time it takes for one wave cycle to complete.
Sampling of the continuous signal to Discrete Signal
In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal.
Signal sampling representation. The continuous signal S(t) is represented with a green colored line while the discrete samples are indicated by the blue vertical lines. With further involved processes the discrete signal can be converted to digital signal.
Convert Discrete signal to Digital Signal
There is complex processing and math calculation to convert Discrete signal to a digital signal. I can not explain it in detail, because I don’t have the capacity to do that hahahaha.
Based on the above picture, we can see that the digital signal is presented in binary. Actually, binary is just an abstraction layer that could be understood by humans, in reality everything is just an electric. We can use an oscillator to produce a periodic, oscillating electronic signal, often a sine wave or a square wave or a triangle wave.
Motherboard component that generate electronic signal
Oscillating crystal is a component that generates a base frequency which transforms from a sine wave to a square wave. The signal from the base clock then goes through frequency multipliers that increase the frequency of the signal. The signal could be the input of the CPU component.
CPU clocking
In general, a higher clock speed means a faster CPU. However, many other factors can come into play, as well. Your CPU processes many instructions from different programs every second. Some of these instructions involve simple arithmetic, while others are more complicated. The clock speed measures the number of cycles your CPU executes per second, measured in GHz (gigahertz). In this case, a “cycle” is the basic unit that measures a CPU’s speed. During each cycle, billions of transistors within the processor open and close . This is how the CPU executes the calculations contained in the instructions it receives.
The flow of clocking should be : Oscillating crystals generate base frequency then the base frequency goes to many components to increase the frequency of the clock signal on CPU. So, to increase the clocking we need to set some parameters so that the component can increase the frequency of the clock signal.
A CPU with a clock speed of 3.2 GHz executes 3.2 billion cycles per second. (Older CPUs had speeds measured in megahertz, or millions of cycles per second.)
Source:
https://openstax.org/books/physics/pages/13-2-wave-properties-speed-amplitude-frequency-and-period
https://www.electrical4u.net/electrical-basic/frequency-measure-frequency/
