Processors

Cycle Speed

# The first term is the speed of light in meters per second 
# (this is actually exact - a meter is defined as 
# "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.".

# The second term, 100 is the number of centimeters in a meter.

# The third term, 1.0/1000000000 is one billionth. (Note that we need the .0 here (or at least 1.) 
# to make Ruby do floating point division. Otherwise, 1/1000000000 would evaluate to 0.)

# So, the first three terms in the product compute the distance in centimeters 
# that light travels in one billionth of a second (or one nanosecond). 
# To compute the number of nanoseconds per cycle for my 1.8 GHz processor, 
# the fourth term is 1 / 1.8. Since there are 1.8 Billion cycles per second, 
# there are 1.8 cycles per nanosecond, and each cycle takes 1 / 1.8 nanoseconds.

# The method calculate_cycle calculates your own computer ghz if your go to mac
# Apple logo on your nav bar you can see your processor speed 
# Then you can calcualte the percentage of a nanosecond that your 
# computer takes to compelete a single cycle


def calculate_cycle(ghz)
  299792458 * 100 * 1.0/1000000000 * 1/ghz
end