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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 ...
Guess and backtrack: One important example of item-to-item dependency is the handling of a conditional branch instruction X by an instruction pipeline. The first stage A of the pipeline, that fetches the next instruction Y to be executed, cannot perform its task until X has fetched its operand and determined whether the branch is to be taken or ...
The instruction fetch and decode stages send the second instruction one cycle after the first. They flow down the pipeline as shown in this diagram: In a naive pipeline, without hazard consideration, the data hazard progresses as follows: In cycle 3, the SUB instruction calculates the new value for r10.
Instruction pipelining, where the execution of multiple instructions can be partially overlapped. Superscalar execution, VLIW, and the closely related explicitly parallel instruction computing concepts, in which multiple execution units are used to execute multiple instructions in parallel.
In computer science, instruction scheduling is a compiler optimization used to improve instruction-level parallelism, which improves performance on machines with instruction pipelines. Put more simply, it tries to do the following without changing the meaning of the code:
The instruction cycle (also known as the fetch–decode–execute cycle, or simply the fetch–execute cycle) is the cycle that the central processing unit (CPU) follows from boot-up until the computer has shut down in order to process instructions. It is composed of three main stages: the fetch stage, the decode stage, and the execute stage.
In the "Simple superscalar pipeline" figure, fetching two instructions at the same time is superscaling, and fetching the next two before the first pair has been written back is pipelining. The superscalar technique is traditionally associated with several identifying characteristics (within a given CPU):
In a standard five-stage pipeline, during the decoding stage, the control unit will determine whether the decoded instruction reads from a register to which the currently executed instruction writes. If this condition holds, the control unit will stall the instruction by one clock cycle.