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 ;)