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Concept
Instruction pipelining
Summary
In computer engineering, instruction pipelining is a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. Pipelining attempts to keep every part of the processor busy with some instruction by dividing incoming instructions into a series of sequential steps (the eponymous "pipeline") performed by different processor units with different parts of instructions processed in parallel.
In a pipelined computer, instructions flow through the central processing unit (CPU) in stages. For example, it might have one stage for each step of the von Neumann cycle: Fetch the instruction, fetch the operands, do the instruction, write the results. A pipelined computer usually has "pipeline registers" after each stage. These store information from the instruction and calculations so that the logic gates of the next stage can do the next step.
This arrangement lets the CPU complete an instruction on each clock cycle. It is common for even-numbered stages to operate on one edge of the square-wave clock, while odd-numbered stages operate on the other edge. This allows more CPU throughput than a multicycle computer at a given clock rate, but may increase latency due to the added overhead of the pipelining process itself. Also, even though the electronic logic has a fixed maximum speed, a pipelined computer can be made faster or slower by varying the number of stages in the pipeline. With more stages, each stage does less work, and so the stage has fewer delays from the logic gates and could run at a higher clock rate.
A pipelined model of computer is often the most economical, when cost is measured as logic gates per instruction per second. At each instant, an instruction is in only one pipeline stage, and on average, a pipeline stage is less costly than a multicycle computer. Also, when made well, most of the pipelined computer's logic is in use most of the time. In contrast, out of order computers usually have large amounts of idle logic at any given instant.
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