Cycle per second operation. Thus, one becquerel is one event per second "on average", whereas one hertz is one event per second on a regular cycle. Cycle can also be a unit for measuring usage of reciprocating machines, especially presses, in which cases "cycle" refers to one complete revolution of the mechanism being measured (i.e. the shaft of a reciprocating engine). Cycle per second The cycle per second was a once-common English name for the unit of frequency now known as the hertz (Hz). The plural form was typically used, often written cycles per second, cycles/second, c.p.s., c/s, ~, or, ambiguously, just cycles.
Cycles per instruction for a given benchmarking process. Let us assume a classic RISC pipeline, with the following five stages: Each stage requires one clock cycle and an instruction passes through the stages sequentially. Without pipelining, a new instruction is fetched in stage 1 only after the previous instruction finishes at stage 5, therefore the number of clock cycles it takes to execute an instruction is five (CPI = 5 > 1). In this case, the processor is said to be "subscalar". With pipelining, a new instruction is fetched every clock cycle by exploiting instruction-level parallelism, therefore, since one could theoretically have five