Chapter 3. Pipelined Execution

All of the processor architectures that you’ve looked at so far are relatively simple, and they reflect the earliest stages of computer evolution. This chapter will bring you closer to the modern computing era by introducing one of the key innovations that underlies the rapid performance increases that have characterized the past few decades of microprocessor development: pipelined execution.

Pipelined execution is a technique that enables microprocessor designers to increase the speed at which a processor operates, thereby decreasing the amount of time that the processor takes to execute a program. This chapter will first introduce the concept of pipelining by means of a factory analogy, and it will then apply the ...

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