Any binary operation (subject to the usual "well behaved" caveat) can be split up into any number of steps; this is called pipelining. In fact there's not reall

Any binary operation (subject to the usual "well behaved" caveat) can be split up into any number of steps; this is called pipelining. In fact there's not really a reason why multiplication isn't a single cycle step, other than speed and energy efficiency. The maximum clock speed of an operation is limited by how fast a change in the input can be propagated into the correct change in output. You can get around this by splitting the operation into multiple mini-steps (pipelining) and clocking it to as fast as the slowest stage will go.