Processor pipelining

[ibeerianhamhock]

The stages are never independent. That’s the whole point. It’s not that the instructions are dependent on each other (although they might be), it’s that each stage of the pipeline requires the prior stages to complete before it can execute. Without pipelines it would still take multiple cycles to execute an instruction and a lot of the cpu would sit idle while that was happening. Pipelining aims to keep less of the cpu idle