A CPU architecture that allows more than one instruction to be executed in one clock cycle by using multiple execution units. Except for low-cost, low-speed microcontrollers, superscalar architecture is very common in CPUs, actually dating back to the 1960s.
In addition to superscalar architecture, today's multicore CPUs execute instructions in parallel, and GPUs perform billions of calculations per second. See
GPU,
pipeline processing,
multicore and
multithreading.