Speedup again

Understanding instruction pipelining and throughput

This is an easy computer architecture question that tests whether you can reason about the difference between latency and throughput in a pipelined processor. It builds on basic pipeline concepts and asks you to trace through the execution timeline carefully, accounting for the initial fill phase of an empty pipeline.

The key insight is recognizing that pipelining allows multiple instructions to occupy different stages simultaneously, but the pipeline must first "fill up" before reaching steady-state throughput. To solve problems like this, you track which instruction occupies which stage at each time step, then count how many instructions reach the final stage (write-back) within the given time window.

• Pipeline depth and initiation interval
• Distinction between single-instruction latency and multi-instruction throughput
• Pipeline fill time vs. steady-state behavior