He Who Fights And Runs Away...

OK, I concede temporary defeat. Pipelining is proving too large a drain on the progress of the project - it's working, and performance is better than it was after the first attempt, but it's still nowhere near as good as the non-pipelined version. So, for now, this goes to the back-burner and I'm returning to the IDE. I have a pretty good idea for how to do some branch prediction and 'loop unrolling' which will make the pipeline quicker, but that's another week or two's effort; I really don't want to get bogged-down in this and stall the project further, so a tactical retreat is in order.

Accordingly, I've reverted the codebase to the pre-pipeline version and rolled-in the few bugfixes I'd made elsewhere in the code as I implemented and tested the pipeline constructs. So we're now back to where we were a fortnight ago, and the pipelined version is tucked away waiting for the day I return to it. In the meantime, on with the IDE!

In a few days I'll post some screenshots so you can see how it's shaping up.