Using Graphics and Animation to Visualize Instruction Pipelining and its Hazards

The breakthrough of pipelined microprocessors has brought about a need to teach instruction pipelining in electrical and computer engineering curricula at the undergraduate level to a considerable depth. Although the idea of pipelining is conceptually simple, students often find pipelining difficult to visualize. Only the most talented students assimilate the ideas of how hazard issues are eliminated. Based on the pedagogical approach used in the landmark book “Computer Architecture—A Quantitative Approach” by John Hennessy and David Patterson, we have developed a graphical tool that uses animation and other graphical techniques to visualize how a pipelined datapath and control unit work. In this paper, we describe the graphical tool and outline a laboratory that makes use of it.