What is instruction pipelining?
Q: What is instruction pipelining?
A: Instruction pipelining is a technique used in the design of modern microprocessors, microcontrollers and CPUs to increase their instruction throughput by dividing the processing of a CPU instruction into a series of independent steps with storage at the end of each step.
Q: How does pipelining work?
A: Pipelining works by breaking down the logic into smaller pieces and inserting flip flops between pieces of logic, which reduces the time required for the logic to decode values until generating valid outputs depending on these values. This allows for faster clock periods.
Q: What are some examples of pipelines?
A: An example of a pipeline is the RISC pipeline, which is broken into five stages with a set of flip flops between each stage.
Q: How does pipelining increase instruction throughput?
A: Pipelining increases instruction throughput by allowing CPU modules to work in parallel, which reduces idle time during an instruction cycle and increases overall processing time.
Q: Is every pipeline fully pipelined?
A: No, not every pipeline is fully pipelined; some pipelines have wait cycles that delay progress in the pipeline.
