Applying the Analogy
Bringing our discussion back to microprocessors, it should be easy to see how this concept applies to the four phases of an instruction’s lifecycle. Just as the owners of the factory in our analogy wanted to increase the number of SUVs that the factory could finish in a given period of time, microprocessor designers are always looking for ways to increase the number of instructions that a CPU can complete in a given period of time. When you recall that a program is an ordered sequence of instructions, it becomes clear that increasing the number of instructions executed per unit time is one way to decrease the total amount of time that it takes to execute a program. (The other way to decrease a program’s execution time is to ...
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