We ll start from the ground up, and build a general overview of what pipelining is, and why it s used. As a side note, this is designed to be a beginning-level tutorial on pipelining and in CPU architecture in general. If you already have a sound grasp on the concepts, or if you re an engineer at Intel already, there s probably not much new here. To be honest, not a whole lot. It s really little more than an extremely fast calculator.
Processors are capable of only simple arithmetic, and simple logical decisions.
For example, take the value of a , and add it to the value of b , or determine if a is greater than b . Further, once the instructions and data have been located, interpreted, and executed, the result must then be stored in memory for later use. And so we have a very simplified model of what must be done in order for a processor to complete an instruction. We ll restate it, for clarity s sake. Interpret or translate the instruction from the software, commonly called Decoding the instruction.