Instruction pipelining

Instruction pipelining is a technique that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. It therefore allows faster CPU throughput (the number of instructions that can be executed in a unit of time) than would otherwise be possible at a given clock rate. The basic instruction cycle is broken up into a series called a pipeline. Rather than processing each instruction sequentially (finishing one instruction before starting the next), each instruction is split up into a sequence of steps so different steps can be executed in parallel and instructions can be processed concurrently (starting one instruction before finishing the previous one).