Your CPU Runs Several Instructions at Once. IBM Fired the Woman Who Showed How in 1968.

She worked under a new name for three decades before a historian’s website brought her design back to her

Wesley Wei

7 min read

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Oct 23, 2026

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You wrote these three lines in this order.

Your processor does not have to run them in that order. While the first line waits on memory, a modern core can run the other two, and it can start more than one instruction in the same clock cycle. Arm says its Cortex-A75, a core that went into phones, can execute up to three instructions in parallel per clock cycle.

It is not only phones. Arm’s manual for the Cortex-A72 calls it a superscalar, out-of-order pipeline, and that is the core inside the Raspberry Pi 4, a board the company says had sold more than 14 million by 2023. If one sits on your desk, it does this all day.