Mechanical latency

The different contributing factors to latency are sometimes categorized slightly differently. Mechanical latency, for instance, describes the delay introduced into a network by the time it takes for the physical components to actually generate or receive a signal. So, for instance, if your 64-bit computer has a clock speed of 4.0 GHz, this sets a physical, mechanical limit on the total amount of information that can be processed in a given second. Now, to be fair, it would be a lot of information to be processed by such a system. Assuming the CPU is processing a single byte per clock cycle, it's 4 billion 64-bit instructions per second being processed; that's a ton. But that clock speed constitutes a mechanical limit that introduces some measurable latency to any transaction. On such a system, a 64-bit instruction cannot move onto the network transmission device any faster than at least 0.000000128 seconds, assuming a bit is processed and delivered to the transmission stream at every interval of the clock cycle.