Pipelining the DLX
How much advantage comes from pipelining and what prevents it from being achieved?
- Parallelism- speeds up a sequential process
- In the best case, a pipeline with n stages will improve instruction execution time by n.
- Problems:
- overhead to create and control the pipeline
- difficult to divide process into n equal stages
- memory bandwidth (1.3 memory refs/instruction)
- stalling due to hazards (structural, data, and control hazards)