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.
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“I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.”
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