To understand the benefit of a pipeline, imagine that a car manufacturing plant had to wait for each car to be fully completed before starting on the next one. That would be horribly inefficient, right? It makes much more sense to work on many cars at once, completing them one stage at a time. This is what a pipeline in a computer allows. Pipelining, as it is called, often keeps around six instructions at once in the processor at different stages of processing. Pipelines can be used for the CPU as well as for accessing memory (DRAM).