This is not necessarily the same as dividing the time span by the latency if pipelining is used. Pipelining Definition Pipelining is the ability to overlap execution of different instructions at the same time. It exploits parallelism among instructions and is NOT visible to the programmer. This is similar to building a car on an assembly line. While it may take two hours to build a single car, there are hundreds of car in progress at any time.
Pipeline stages Each step in a pipeline is called a pipe stage .
In our assembly line example, a stage corresponds to a work station on the assembly line. A machine cycle is usually one, sometimes two, clock cycles long, but rarely more. Pipeline cycle time All pipeline stages must, by design, take the same time. Thus, the machine cycle time is that of the longest pipeline stage. Ideally, all stages should be exactly the same length.