Instruction Pipeline

An instruction pipeline is a technique used in the design of computers to increase their instruction throughput (the number of instructions that can be executed in a unit of time). Pipelining does not reduce the time to complete an instruction, but increases the number of instructions that can be processed at once.

Each instruction is split into a sequence of dependent steps. The first step is always to fetch the instruction from memory; the final step is usually writing the results of the instruction to processor registers or to memory. Pipelining seeks to let the processor work on as many instructions as there are dependent steps, just as an assembly line builds many vehicles at once, rather than waiting until one vehicle has passed through the line before admitting the next one. As the goal of the assembly line is to keep each assembler productive at all times, pipelining seeks to use every portion of the processor busy with some instruction. Pipelining lets the computer's cycle time be the time of the slowest step, and ideally lets one instruction complete in every cycle.

The term pipeline is an analogy that stems from the fact that each part of the processor is doing work, as there is fluid in each link of a pipeline.