does it use custom hardware or soes it work om commodity PCs? If I recall correctly, spanner used GPS.or atomic clocks to have precise time on every machine, and that enables it to perform much better.
https://www.yugabyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Distribu...
From Jepsen - "yugabyte seems mostly resilient to clock skews' - this is a very safe but at the same time a vague statement. What does mostly mean ? Good for 99% of practical use cases ?
Edit: To address the first part of your comment, the atomic clocks narrow the bounds on how bad your NTP clock can be. Spanner essentially waits out the bounds on clock variance on each write transaction to get consistency. There still would be a measurable bound on your clock precision without the atomic clock, but it would be a lot larger.