Pipelining
Pipelining is used by processors to improve efficiency
While the processor is decoding an instruction, it fetches the next instruction to be
processed (program counter is incremented
For computers with multiple cores, this process is able to split between them and
made much more efficient
Program which contain many branch instructions won’t benefit from pipelining as
much – the use of conditional statements slows down the processor as it jumps to
different instructions which might not have been fetched and can cause the ‘flushing
of the pipe’ that have been processed but not needed due to the jump
‘How can the speed of a processor be increase further?’
To increase processor speed, one way of doing this is pipelining the processor. This is done by
fetching the next instruction to be processed while the current one is being processed by
another processor core. This will increase the efficiency of the processor as the components
aren’t idle. However, an issue with this is if there are branch instructions which causes the
processor to jump to other instructions which would not have been fetched yet which means
processor cycles are skipped and time is wasted.
Pipelining is used by processors to improve efficiency
While the processor is decoding an instruction, it fetches the next instruction to be
processed (program counter is incremented
For computers with multiple cores, this process is able to split between them and
made much more efficient
Program which contain many branch instructions won’t benefit from pipelining as
much – the use of conditional statements slows down the processor as it jumps to
different instructions which might not have been fetched and can cause the ‘flushing
of the pipe’ that have been processed but not needed due to the jump
‘How can the speed of a processor be increase further?’
To increase processor speed, one way of doing this is pipelining the processor. This is done by
fetching the next instruction to be processed while the current one is being processed by
another processor core. This will increase the efficiency of the processor as the components
aren’t idle. However, an issue with this is if there are branch instructions which causes the
processor to jump to other instructions which would not have been fetched yet which means
processor cycles are skipped and time is wasted.
