Editing Pipeline (computing) (section)

== Costs and drawbacks ==
A pipelined system typically requires more resources (circuit elements, processing units, computer memory, etc.) than one that executes one batch at a time, because its stages cannot share those resources, and because buffering and additional synchronization logic may be needed between the elements.

Moreover, the transfer of items between separate processing elements may increase the latency, especially for long pipelines.

The additional complexity cost of pipelining may be considerable if there are dependencies between the processing of different items, especially if a guess-and-backtrack strategy is used to handle them. Indeed, the cost of implementing that strategy for complex instruction sets has motivated some radical proposals to simplify [[computer architecture]], such as [[RISC]] and [[VLIW]]. [[Compiler]]s also have been burdened with the task of rearranging the machine instructions so as to improve the performance of instruction pipelines.