Microarchitecture
Complicating this simple-looking series of steps is the fact that the memory hierarchy, which includes caching, main memory and non-volatile storage like hard disks, (where the program instructions and data are) has always been slower than the processor itself. Step (2) often introduces a delay (in CPU terms often called a "stall") while the data arrives over the computer bus. A big amount of research has been put into designs that avoid these delays as much as possible. Over the years, a central design goal was to execute more instructions in parallel, thus increasing the effective execution speed of a program. These efforts introduced complicated logic and circuit structures.