What is pipeline?

That long pipe thingie where oil is transported...


Really, read the wikipedia. Or ask more precise questions.
 
When you do laundry you first wash your clothes, then you dry them. The washer and the drier can be considered as two pipeline stages processing your clothes. If you have a shared laundry room in your apartment house it's to great advantage to pipeline people's laundry. In my previous apartment they had arranged it with separate time slots dedicated to one household at a time. So within my slot I'd first wash, then dry, and only once I was done did the next household get to process their clothes. This is a non-pipelined setup, and as a result half of the available resources were idle at all times. Either the clothes were in the washer or in the drier, and the other was idle. Where I live now we have a pipelined setup. First I wash, then when I dry then next person can start using the washing machines. In both cases I had three hours available for my laundry needs, so the individual tasks as such didn't speed up, but the throughput increased massively. At my previous place 4 households could do laundry every day, and where I live there are 7 laundry slots available every day. Pipelining in hardware works by the same principle.
 
If you separate your whites and colors, yes. In Humus' previous apartment, that would allow for pipelining with bubbles (the bubbles being at the start and end of the task, when you have an empty/idle dryer and washer, respectively).

Divine Love, I would have referred you to the THG overview you posted in another thread, but they're talking about parallel pipelines, not sequential pipelining.

Edit: Too slow....
 
Yep, pipeline.
Waiting for your replies.
thanks in advance.
It's just like a production line in a typical factory. To produce item "X" (be it a car, tin of soup, or a textured pixel) it has to go though a lot of separate processes. It may take a while (aka latency) from start to finish to produce a particular item but, as many are going down the production line at the same time, the throughput can be high.
 
When you do laundry you first wash your clothes, then you dry them. The washer and the drier can be considered as two pipeline stages processing your clothes. If you have a shared laundry room in your apartment house it's to great advantage to pipeline people's laundry. In my previous apartment they had arranged it with separate time slots dedicated to one household at a time. So within my slot I'd first wash, then dry, and only once I was done did the next household get to process their clothes. This is a non-pipelined setup, and as a result half of the available resources were idle at all times. Either the clothes were in the washer or in the drier, and the other was idle. Where I live now we have a pipelined setup. First I wash, then when I dry then next person can start using the washing machines. In both cases I had three hours available for my laundry needs, so the individual tasks as such didn't speed up, but the throughput increased massively. At my previous place 4 households could do laundry every day, and where I live there are 7 laundry slots available every day. Pipelining in hardware works by the same principle.

That is funny. This example is exactly the same as the one used in the books of Hennesy and Patterson on computer architectures.
 
That is funny. This example is exactly the same as the one used in the books of Hennesy and Patterson on computer architectures.
Are you suggesting Messrs Hennesy and Patterson were spying on Humus as he laundered his smalls?
 
That is funny. This example is exactly the same as the one used in the books of Hennesy and Patterson on computer architectures.

Yeah, it's a common analogy. Simple enough to make even someone with limited hardware knowledge understand the concept.
 
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