How is superscalar design different from pipelining design? What are their advantages and disadvantages?
The number of instructions a microprocessor can handle in a single clock cycle is a crucial factor to the processor’s performance and it depends on the design of the processor itself. Among today’s processors, the number of instructions per clock cycle has been sped up through two processes, called pipelining and superscalar execution. A microprocessor uses pipelining or superscalar technology is said to have pipeline or superscalar design. Pipelining allows the processor to read a new instruction from memory before it is finished processing the current one. It works by splitting the instruction fetch, decode and execution into independent stages; as an instruction goes through each stage, the next instruction follows it does not need to wait until it completely finishes. The extent to which pipelined data can flow into the processor is called the pipeline depth. In Intel 80286 processor family, the pipeline depth is only 1 which means in effect, there was no pipeline at all. However,
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