Basically every device that is connected to main power and has a clock skips an internal quartz based circuit. Usually, this gives much higher precision for the same price point because frequency is typically controlled very, very tightly.
same for me, drove me nuts. Fortunately my PC looks at atomic clocks...
Your PC also has a quartz oscillator and battery backing, there's no way it synchronizes time from AC power.
sure, I just meant my PC has a very sophisticated (hence fragile) way of keeping its time accurate.
And forget about battery backing, it's a desktop and its bios battery is long dead :-) (hence the atomic clock)
Once you do synchronize it off the net, it's still the quartz oscillator keeping the local beat, as it were :)
I synchronize with ntp every 500 million cpu cycles :p
IIRC modern operatings systems use counters in the CPU for timekeeping instead of directly accessing the RTC
Well, the CPU is somewhat beyond my ken. You are right, of course - yet I think there would be another oscillator driving the clock generator as well. Turtles all the way down ;)