Modern processors execute more than one instruction per cycle by executing several instructions in parallel on each core. In sequential code, it's common that

Modern processors execute more than one instruction per cycle by executing several instructions in parallel on each core. In sequential code, it's common that some instructions are independent and can theoretically be executed in parallel, this is measured with ILP (Insturction Level Parallelism). Modern processors exploit ILP by detecting dependencies between instructions and execute independent instructions in parallel. These are superscalar processors. In addition, some extensions of the instruction sets add instructions that allow you to compute several data at the same time. They are called SIMD extensions (Single Instruction Multiple Data).