very basic question and i did search around, but didn't find anything.

So, what exactly does the CPU Cycles refer to?

If i want to emulate the speed of a 486 or a 386, then what should the value of this be?

I'm trying to run Tornado and it seems to run decent by increasing the speed; but i know for a fact that it ran very well (almost perfect) on my old 466 MHZ processor and if possible, i just want to configure DosBox to emulate that speed....

I know i'm going to probably get an answer that it depends on my current CPU speed, but i mean even if my current CPU is 1.7 GHZ what exactly does the 3000 cycles stand for? What is the formula to calculate scaling down the speed of my computer?