Beats Per Minute to Gigahertz (bpm to GHz)

1 beat per minute equals 1.666666667×10⁻¹¹ gigahertz (rounded).

1 beat per minute = 1.666666667×10⁻¹¹ gigahertz

How to convert beats per minute to gigahertz

To convert beats per minute to gigahertz, multiply the number of beats per minute by 1.666666667×10⁻¹¹. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply gigahertz by 60,000,000,000.

gigahertz = beats per minute × 1.666666667×10⁻¹¹

Example: 10 beats per minute = 1.666666667×10⁻¹⁰ gigahertz.

About these units

Beat Per Minute (bpm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One 60th of a hertz. Used for heart rate and music tempo.

Musicians counted beats long before they could count them by the minute. In the Renaissance, performers followed the tactus, a pulse roughly the speed of a heartbeat, and Italian words such as Allegro and Andante took over in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dietrich Winkel built a mechanical metronome in 1814, and Johann Maelzel added a numerical scale and began producing it in 1816. Beethoven was the first notable composer to write metronome markings into his music, doing so in December 1815.

Beats per minute, one sixtieth of a hertz, is now the language of both the concert hall and the clinic. Mechanical metronomes typically cover 40 to 208 bpm, and rough guides place Largo at 40 to 66 and Presto at 168 to 200. For hearts, the American Heart Association gives 60 to 100 bpm as a normal adult resting rate, though a source cited on Wikipedia argues that 50 to 90 fits the evidence better. Trained endurance athletes often sit lower, and the slowest healthy rate on record is listed as 26 bpm, set in 2014.

1 beat per minute = 0.01666666667 hertz (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Metronome; Wikipedia: Tempo; Wikipedia: Heart rate

Gigahertz (GHz)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One billion hertz. Modern processor clocks and Wi-Fi run at gigahertz frequencies.

On 6 March 2000, AMD demonstrated a processor passing the 1 GHz mark, a few days before Intel shipped 1 GHz systems, according to Wikipedia. After that, clock rates rose more slowly: Intel's 3 GHz Pentium 4 arrived in 2002, and later performance came more from design changes than raw speed, since higher clock rates produce more heat. The highest boost clock on a production processor is listed as 6.2 GHz for the Intel i9-14900KS in 2024.

A gigahertz is a billion hertz, the range known as microwaves. The most familiar example may be the kitchen: consumer microwave ovens typically run at 2.45 GHz, a band that is available for industrial, scientific and medical use worldwide. Percy Spencer of Raytheon discovered the heating effect in 1945 when a radar set melted a candy bar in his pocket, and Raytheon sold the first commercial oven, the Radarange, in 1947.

1 gigahertz = 1,000,000,000 hertz (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Clock rate; Wikipedia: Microwave oven; Wikipedia: Gigahertz

Related conversions

See all frequency units.