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All 5 Flashcards — Pipelining
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Question
What is pipelining?
Answer
Overlapping the stages of the fetch–decode–execute cycle, so one instruction executes while the next is decoded and a third is fetched.
Question
Does pipelining make one instruction faster?
Answer
**No.** It still passes through every stage. What improves is **throughput** — how many complete per second.
Question
How long do n instructions take in a k-stage pipeline?
Answer
**k + (n − 1)** stage-times — the k being the one-off cost of filling the pipeline.
Question
Name the three causes of a pipeline stall.
Answer
**Branches** (the next instruction is unknown), **data dependencies** (waiting for a result), **resource conflicts** (two stages want the same hardware).
Question
Why is a deeper pipeline not always better?
Answer
It overlaps more work, but a **wrong branch prediction costs more** because there is more to discard and refill.
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Topic 1.1 hub
Hardware and operation
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