A
superscalar processor is a
CPU that implements a form of
parallelism called
instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a
scalar processor that can execute at most one single instruction per clock cycle, a superscalar processor can execute more than one instruction during a clock cycle by simultaneously dispatching multiple instructions to different
execution units on the processor. It therefore allows for more
throughput (the number of instructions that can be executed in a unit of time) than would otherwise be possible at a given
clock rate. Each execution unit is not a separate processor (or a core if the processor is a
multi-core processor), but an execution resource within a single CPU such as an
arithmetic logic unit.
