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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 ...
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.
Instruction-level parallelism (ILP) is the parallel or simultaneous execution of a sequence of instructions in a computer program. More specifically, ILP refers to the average number of instructions run per step of this parallel execution.
In computing, a pipeline or data pipeline [1] is a set of data processing elements connected in series, where the output of one element is the input of the next one. The elements of a pipeline are often executed in parallel or in time-sliced fashion. Some amount of buffer storage is often inserted between elements. Computer-related pipelines ...
When a next-line predictor points to aligned groups of 2, 4, or 8 instructions, the branch target will usually not be the first instruction fetched, and so the initial instructions fetched are wasted. Assuming for simplicity, a uniform distribution of branch targets, 0.5, 1.5, and 3.5 instructions fetched are discarded, respectively.
The main common concept of each design is a five-stage execution instruction pipeline. During operation, each pipeline stage works on one instruction at a time. Each of these stages consists of a set of flip-flops to hold state, and combinational logic that operates on the outputs of those flip-flops.
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):