Книга: Introduction to Microprocessors and Microcontrollers

Making more use of each clock pulse

Pipelining

To put too much reliance on the clock frequency is like saying that the maximum rpm of the engine determines the maximum speed of a vehicle. Yes, true, but other things like gearbox ratios are also significant. Doing 9000 rpm in first gear will not break any speed records. The real speed of a microprocessor also depends on how much useful work is done during each clock cycle. This is where pipelining is really helpful and is now incorporated in all microprocessors.

Let’s assume we have some numbers to move from the memory to the arithmetic and logic unit (ALU):

If we have another number to be loaded, this would have to repeat the process so loading two numbers would take four clock pulses. Three numbers would take six clock pulses and so on.

During the first clock pulse, a number is being moved along the bus between the memory and the accumulator and so the other part of the bus between the accumulator and the ALU is not used. During the second pulse, we still have one section of the bus idle (Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1 One clock pulse moves one number

Pipelining is the process of making better use of the buses. While one number is shifted from the memory to the accumulator, we can use the same clock pulse to shift another number from the accumulator into the ALU along the other section of the bus. In this way, we get more action for each clock pulse and so the microprocessor completes instructions faster without an increase in the clock speed (Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 One clock pulse moves two numbers

If we get two jobs being done on the same clock cycle, then this has made a significant improvement to the speed without increasing the clock speed. If we can manage to get three pieces of information moving, or jobs done, this is even better. Incidentally the Pentium manages five and the Pentium Pro can manage 12 and the Pentium 4 can keep up to 126 instructions ‘in flight’. Unfortunately, we can never get pipelining to work this well on all instructions, but every little helps.

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