What Is GHz in Computers?

There are a lot of reasons for us to get excited about a new computer, from the opportunity to get more memory than your old one to being able to access newer software and a new operating system if your workplace is making a big leap forward. But there’s one component that seems to make everyone’s list as a vital reason for an upgrade: speed. In computer terms, how fast your processor cycles is measured in hertz. Over the years, the amount of hertz available in processors has gone from 1,000 per second, a kilohertz, to millions, a megahertz, and then billions, a gigahertz.

Hertz History

1. The measurement of the frequency of electrical cycles per second has been in use since 1930. It was named after a German physicist Heinrich Hertz, and in 1960, replaced the closely related term cycles per second. In non-computer environments, hertz can be used to define acceptable ranges of frequencies for things like radio stations, digital clocks and even cordless telephone signals and electronic garage doors.

Hertz in Computers

1. Your computer’s total performance depends on several aspects of your machine’s hardware and software, but the speed of your microprocessor is a significant part of it. Cycles can be understood as tasks or instructions, so a 10-MHz computer can potentially do 10 million items per second, everything from rendering graphics to accepting new input to calculating data, and a 1-GHz processor can perform 1 billion calculations per second. Hertz can also calculate the refresh rate for monitors or the stability and security of wireless networks.

Hertz in Business

1. Businesses benefit from faster computers, especially when tasks require many calculations or machines that need to perform multiple processes at once. A computer that had high levels of kilohertz in the 1990s may be called a dinosaur by 2010 standards, when GHz was the standard, and many technical experts agree the THz, or terahertz per second, is on the horizon, especially if processing power follows the evolution of computer memory, which has also shifted from kilobytes to megabytes to terabytes.

Finding Hertz

1. It’s easy to find the GHz in a computer you’re shopping for, as this figure is usually prominent on packaging, product descriptions or original manuals. For your existing computer, you may see it quickly on the boot page. Or you can right-click “Computer” on your Start menu and choose "Properties." It will appear under System information by processor. ComputerHope suggests that the best way to find the GHz is to look at the processor chip itself, which requires turning off your machine, accessing the inside case and finding the CPU chip. Processor speed is usually the first set of numbers in the list of four numbers.