It is not simply a matter of loading a bunch of adders, multipliers, and the like onto your circuit board -- how do you know which adds, multiplies, or fetches to do? That's the domain of the software that runs the system, an amalgam of the operating system, sophisticated schedulers, and intelligent compilers.

Still, the sophistication of the software wouldn't have any means of demonstrating its capabilities were it not that processors give them the hardware with which to do so many things concurrently.

Each pipeline is intended to perform a set of related tasks on a continuous stream of data flowing through it -- execution-oriented pipelines, for example, make sure that all components of an execution sequence are available for a particular operation by the time that operation is to be executed. Obviously, the more of these pipelines available, the more concurrent complex operations can be supported ... but, here again, the hardware of the pipelines must be intelligently administered by equally intelligent software.