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A mechanical example of a pipeline is a washer/dryer system for clothing. Instead of having one unit that both washes and dries, we have two units that together form a pipeline (the output of the washer enters the drier). If washing takes 1 hour and drying takes 1 hour, the pipeline allows us to finish a full load of laundry every hour, compared to every 2 hours if you had a single (non-pipelined) unit that washed and then dried. |
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A mechanical example of a pipeline is a washer/dryer system for clothing. Instead of having one unit that both washes and dries, we have two units that together form a pipeline (the output of the washer enters the drier). If washing takes 1 hour and drying takes 1 hour, the pipeline allows us to finish a full load of laundry every hour, compared to every 2 hours if you had a single (non-pipelined) unit that washed and then dried. It still requires two hours for an item of clothing to complete its wash/dry cycle of course. |
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Electrically, pipelines are used in microprocessors to allow complex logic sequences to execute at faster speeds. Pipelines are related to the engineering concepts of throughput and latency. |
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Electrically, pipelines are used in microprocessors to allow complex logic sequences to execute at faster speeds. Pipelines are related to the engineering concepts of throughput and latency. In contrast to the washer/drier example above, an instruction pipelining process can increase the instruction throughput without a significant increase in circuit complexity, indeed perhaps the simplest analogy would be a washer/drier mechanism connected to a single drive shaft using a single driving motor? Seven or more pipelining stages are common in microprocessor designs. |
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