A unit of frequency equal to one billion hertz or cycles per second, used to measure the speed of computer processors and radio frequencies.
Combines 'giga-' (one billion) with 'hertz,' named after physicist Heinrich Hertz who discovered electromagnetic waves. The term became standard in computing during the 1990s CPU revolution.
When your phone's processor is 3 gigahertz, it's doing something 3 billion times per second—but here's the twist: a clock speed doesn't directly tell you how fast it actually operates because modern processors do multiple operations per cycle!
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