Review for article "Journal Article Review – The Optimum Pipeline Depth for a Microprocessor" by A. Harstein & T. Puzak.

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As general concept, the optimum depth of a pipeline is given by the length for which the execution time is minimized when it is processed a sequence of instructions equal to the number of pipeline stages. Many of the papers that try to elaborate the “magical” formula for finding the optimum depth of the pipeline consider only the technical indicators that influence the outcome (e.g. by introducing parameters which represent overhead, incorrect branch prediction of the pipeline stalls). Significantly less than these also take into account the power consumption when deriving the optimum depth for the pipelined systems. Another aspect is related to the relevance of the application. The studies have shown how the changes occurred in pipeline’s approaches depend on the hardware implementation and the software philosophy used by one application or another. ...