Say you have two instructions: instr 1 uses 8 cycles, and have 2 cycles tail. instr 2 uses 8 cycles and have 2 cycles head. instr 1: -------- instr 2: -------- As you can see the head and tail overlap eachother. So we save two cycles here, instead of 16c we get 14c. It's also called pipelining, even if the 030 is very limited in these cases. --Anders Eriksson ae@dhs.nu