I learnt some about pipelining but those were 4-stage and 5-stage and I think that modern pipelining typical is much longer and more complicated in practice. How long are typical pipelines and how much can we expect them to increase and where is the point of reaching diminshing returns in performance gains for longer pipelines?
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Intel had 5 pipeline stages in its original Pentium architecture. The number of stages peaked at 31 in the Prescott family, but decreased after that. Today, in the Core series II processors (i3, i5, and i7), there are 14 stages in the processor pipeline.
Microarchitecture Pipeline stages
P5 (Pentium) 5
P6 (Pentium 3) 10
P6 (Pentium Pro) 14
NetBurst (Willamette) 20
NetBurst (Northwood) 20
NetBurst (Prescott) 31
NetBurst (Cedar Mill) 31
Core 14
Bonnell 16
Sandy Bridge 14
Silvermont 14 to 17
Haswell 14
Skylake 14
Kabylake 14
Prescott achieved only modest gains in performance over its predecessor, and its more complex design demanded substantially more power relative to its performance gains. Although there were other contributing factors to Prescott’s disappointing performance, it seems clear that increasing the number of pipelining stages eventually achieves diminishing returns.
References
Prescott Pushes Pipelining Limits
The Intel Architecture Processor Pipeline
List of Intel CPU Microarchitectures
The Optimum Pipeline Depth for a Microprocessor
4
Regarding other modern processors:
- ARM up to 7: 3 stages (still widely used is simpler devices)
- ARM 8-9: 5 stages;
- ARM 11: 8 stages;
- Cortex A7: 8-10 stages;
- Cortex A8: 13 stages;
- Cortex A15: 15-25 stages.
From Wikipedia.