title: Concept of clock tick and clock cycles
body: <p>I have written a very small code to measure the time taken by my multiplication algorithm :</p>
  
  <pre><code>  clock_t begin, end;
    float time_spent;
  
  begin = clock();
  a = b*c;
  end = clock();
  time_spent = (float)(end - begin)/CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am working with mingw under Windows.</p>
  
  <p>I am guessing that <code>end = clock()</code> will give me the clock ticks at that particular moment. Subtracting it from <code>begin</code> will give me clock ticks consumed by multiplication. When I divide with <code>CLOCKS_PER_SEC</code>, I will get the total amount of time.</p>
  
  <p>My first question is: Is there a difference between clock ticks and clock cycle?</p>
  
  <p>My algorithm here is so small that the difference <code>end-begin</code> is 0. Does this mean that my code execution time was less than 1 tick and that's why I am getting zero?</p>