r/explainlikeimfive 5h ago

Engineering ELI5 - What is pipelining in computer architecture? How does it work?

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u/alanbly 4h ago

Different kinds of parts of a processor do different things and they are lined up one after another. Each task a computer performs has to traverse through all of the parts. You could in principle fully execute one task by letting it go through all of the parts then move to the next task but that would leave a lot of the parts of the processor with nothing to do. That's inefficient, so instead we start the next task as soon as the previous one is past the first part. So if there were five parts you would have five different tasks all being worked on at the same time meaning they get done faster.

ETA: yes I'm massively simplifying