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Structural Hazard

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:56 am
In processing, the phenomenon when a planned instruction cannot execute in the proper clock cycle, or clock tick, because the hardware it is running on cannot support the combination of instructions that are set to execute in the given clock cycle, causing resource conflicts. For example, a structural hazard would occur if a processor tried to use the same memory port for both instructions and data. Structural hazards commonly are overcome by pipelining MIPS instruction sets.