piotr said:
I'm not an Engl. native-speaker, that's why I'm asking:
I'd like to know what means 'pipeline' (e.g. 16-bit
pipeline) in processor knowledge. Is it a bus or it is
a register meant about.
Hi,
A pipeline is not a "bit" mesure, it's a depth.
You know the path of an instruction into the CPU before being executed is
very long : the cpu has to fetch it from memory to cache, from cache to
execution buffer, to decode it (understand what's it's going to do), guess
the next instruction pointer, lock the used registers, then execute it and
put back the results in the registers/memory if they are still coherent.
All of these can take like 20 clock cycles. It's a lot too much. That's why
instead of doing all of this in one clock cycle (it's not possible) the cpu
makes a pipeline containing instructions, and at each cycle, each
instruction leaves one pipeline state to another. with that trick, the cpu
virtually executes 1 instruction per clock cycle.
There are still problems like registers interlocking (2 instructions in the
pipeline need the same registers for writing) or path changes (the
instruction in the pipeline says to change the instruction pointer, so we
guess it but it was no chance the program jumped somewhere else and all
pipeline results had to be discarded.
For instance, athlon64 has 3 independant pipelines meaning you can do 3
things at once if you don't use the same registers, with one cycle.
Regards,
Aris
