In this a stream of instructions can be executed by overlapping fetch, decode and execute phases of an instruction cycle. This type of technique is used to increase the throughput of the computer system. An instruction pipeline reads instruction from the memory while previous instructions are being executed in other segments of the pipeline. Thus we can execute multiple instructions simultaneously. The pipeline will be more efficient if the instruction cycle is divided into segments of equal duration.
An arithmetic pipeline divides an arithmetic problem into various sub problems for execution in various pipeline segments. It is used for floating point operations, multiplication and various other computations. The process or flowchart arithmetic pipeline for floating point addition is shown in the diagram.
