No, it doesn’t. Putting aside that there is an entire field of clockless designs, asynchronous logic, free-running clocks, etc. You should think of this as “wh

No, it doesn’t. Putting aside that there is an entire field of clockless designs, asynchronous logic, free-running clocks, etc. You should think of this as “when the cpu is processing an instruction, what does it need to track to dispatch and retire it?” Designing to a click tick is one version and kind of where things were in the 1970s. It’s an educational model.