Depth of a pipeline in a CPU's architecture?

Question

In a course on CPU architectures, I encountered the word "depth of a pipeline" in one of the exercises, but I don't know what's meant by the depth of a pipeline. Is it the number of stages of the pipeline or something else?

Answer 1

I pipeline is used to pre-fetch instructions from memory into the CPU so that when the CPU is ready ofr an instruction it's already there and the CPU can just go ahead and execute it, instead of waiting for it to come from memory. That's how you get one instruction per CPU clock cycle. Otherwise, the CPU has to just sit there for the memory to respond (which in CPU clock time is a looooong time).

So the depth of the pipeline is measured in how many instructions it can pre-fetch and store ahead of time.