Costs and Drawbacks
As the assembly line example shows, pipelining doesn't decrease the time for a single datum to be processed; it only increases the throughput of the system when processing a stream of data.
High pipelining leads to increase of latency - the time required for a signal to propagate through a full pipe.
A pipelined system typically requires more resources (circuit elements, processing units, computer memory, etc.) than one that executes one batch at a time, because its stages cannot reuse the resources of a previous stage. Moreover, pipelining may increase the time it takes for an instruction to finish.
Read more about this topic: Pipeline (computing)
Famous quotes containing the words costs and/or drawbacks:
“It costs more to maintain ten vices than one virtue.”
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