Pipeline is the process of accumulating instruction from the process through a pipeline. It allows strong and executing instructions in an orderly process. It is also known as pipeling process.

Pipeline is a technique where multiple instructions are overlapped during execution. Pipeline is divided into stages and these stages are connected with one another to form a pipe like structure. Instructions entered from one end and exit from another end.

Pipelining increases the overal instruction throughput. 


  1. Arithmetic Pipeline 
  2. Instruction Pipeline 
Arithmetic Pipeline 
Arithmetic pipeline unit are found in usually in most of the high speed computers. Floating point operations, multiplication of fixed-point numbers, and similar computation in scientific problem. 
For example : the input to floating point adder pipeline is : 
x = A*Z^a
y = B*2^b

Here, A and B are significant digits of floating point number, while a and b are exponents.


Instruction Pipeline
In this a stream of instructions can be executed by overlapping fetch, decode and execute phases of an instruction cycle. This type of technique is used to increases the throughput of the computer system.

An instruction pipeline reads instruction from the memory while previous instructions are being executed in other segments of the pipeline. Thus we can execute multiple instructions simultaneously. The pipeline will be more efficient if the instruction cycle is divided into segment of equal duration.