In digital logic applications, bit-serial architectures send data one bit at a time, along a single wire, in contrast to bit-parallel architectures, in which data values are sent all bits at once along a group of wires.
All computers before 1951, and most of the early massive parallel processing machines used a bit-serial architecture -- they were serial computers.
Bit-serial architectures were developed for digital signal processing in the 1960s through 1980s, including efficient structures for bit-serial multiplication and accumulation.
Often N serial processors will take less FPGA area and and have higher total performance than a single N-bit parallel processor.
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)