> To make it faster, you either have to decrease the time for a step (but you will always be capped with the slowest step), or go for parallelism---a separate p

> To make it faster, you either have to decrease the time for a step (but you will always be capped with the slowest step), or go for parallelism---a separate pipeline (or pipelines). > A single pipeline just makes the output have a predictable latency and time; multiple pipelines give you parallelism. No, the pipeline does give you parallelism because you're doing three (in the bottling example) pieces of work simultaneously, that is: in parallel. Filling, capping, labeling are each being done on different bottles at the same time. How is that not parallelism? Let's use some numbers: Filling, capping, labeling take 30s, 15s, 15s each (arbitrary, chosen for easy math). Without a pipeline you will process 60 bottles per hour (say one station that does all 3 tasks and then kicks out the bottle, let's ignore transition times). With a pipeline you can get 120 per hour. You've improved throughput. The latency per bottle is still 60s. BTW, you can double throughput again without even needing a full second pipeline just by adding a second filling station (with my example numbers) and feeding filled bottles to the same capping and labeling stages, getting you to 240 per hour.