Frequency of exceedance any peak exceeding is . Its complement, is the probability of exceedance, the probability that has been exceeded at least once by time . This probability can be useful to estimate whether an extreme event will occur during a specified time period, such as the lifespan of a structure or the duration of an operation. If is small, for example for the frequency of a rare event occurring in a short time period, then Under this assumption, the frequency of exceedance is equal to the probability of exceedance per unit time, , and the probability of exceedance can be computed
Cycles per instruction for a given benchmarking process. Let us assume a classic RISC pipeline, with the following five stages: Each stage requires one clock cycle and an instruction passes through the stages sequentially. Without pipelining, a new instruction is fetched in stage 1 only after the previous instruction finishes at stage 5, therefore the number of clock cycles it takes to execute an instruction is five (CPI = 5 > 1). In this case, the processor is said to be "subscalar". With pipelining, a new instruction is fetched every clock cycle by exploiting instruction-level parallelism, therefore, since one could theoretically have five