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clock tick Last modified: Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Same as a cycle, the smallest unit of time recognized by a device. For personal computers, clock ticks generally refer to the main system clock, which runs at 66 MHz. This means that there are 66 million clock ticks (or cycles) per second. Since modern CPUs run much faster (up to 3 GHz), the CPU can execute several instructions in a single clock tick.