Pipelining Flashcards
DEFINE: Pipelining.
The process of breaking down tasks into smaller pieces in order to enable parallelism at a micro level.
DEFINE: Latency.
The time it takes to complete a process, start to finish.
DEFINE: Throughput.
The number of tasks a system can complete per unit of time.
TRUE/FALSE: Optimizing for Throughput is always valued over Latency.
FALSE. Some applications value Latency more, such as airbags.
For combinational circuits, what is Latency measured with?
Propagation delay.
For combinational circuits, what is Throughput measured with?
1 / Propagation delay.
What feature do Pipelined Circuits most prominently display?
Registers at the end of ALU’s, storing the output.
How many clock cycles does a 4-stage pipeline take to complete?
Minimally, 4.
Why is Pipelining performed?
To get the most use out of every microarchitectural component by avoiding idle time, thereby maximizing throughput.
TRUE/FALSE: Pipelining circuits slightly increase Latency but also increase Throughput.
TRUE.
Given a 4-stage pipeline, how many registers will a path hit?
4.
TRUE/FALSE: More pipelines, given infinite silicon and infinite money, are always better.
FALSE. Diminishing returns occur when having to delay by many stages.
