Pipelining

Also called instruction pipelining, pipelining is a microprocessing technique where data elements are connected in series (one after the other), but can carry out other operations separately. This method organizes multiple stages of a task to be processed at the same time (in parallel).

Pipelines allow for an increase in performance and the overall throughput of a processor. For example, without pipelining, a processor may work through the instructions that fetch, decode, and execute over three different clock cycles. However, with pipelining, the processor could combine these separate instructions, effectively processing them in one cycle instead of three.

CPU terms, Instruction, Machine cycle, Parallel, Pipe, Pipeline flush, Superscalar