Time taken to produce an output in a serial and parallel divider
Both?
The throughput/latency trade is important, because it gives you two different definitions of &quot;speed&quot; to work towards. Do you want to pass in A/B and get the result as fast as possible? Or do you have two huge sets of numbers (A1, A2, .. A1000) (B1 ... B1000) and want to get the whole lot done in as short a time as possible? Because the answers are subtly different.
Division is different from the other primitive operations in that most of the algorithms are inherently iterative - if you were doing it on paper, you'd be doing the same thing multiple times on intermediate results. So dividers tend to be multi-cycle anyway.
Note that with pipelined architectures, while they tend to have a higher clock speed they also tend to take more cycles to give back the answer, so the overall time many not be shorter.