A unit of frequency equal to one billion cycles per second, used in electronics and telecommunications to measure oscillation rates.
From 'giga-' (one billion) combined with 'cycle,' referring to repeated oscillations. This term developed in electrical engineering as technology required measurement of increasingly rapid frequencies.
Modern computer processors operate at gigacycle speeds—a 3-gigahertz CPU completes about 3 billion computational cycles every single second, which is why heat generation became a major engineering challenge!
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