Alternatively called instruction pipelining or pipeline, pipelining is an advanced microprocessing technique that handles multiple stages of different computer instructions at once.

For example, without pipelining a processor may process the instructions fetch, decode, and execute from three different instructions in three different clock cycles. However, with pipelining the processor could combine the different instructions into one cycle and effectively do three different things in one cycle instead of three.

Pipelining allows for an increase in performance and the overall throughput of the processor.

CPU terms, Instruction, Machine cycle, Parallel, Pipe, Pipeline flush, Superscalar

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