# lec1 > What on earth? \ The first lecture has bee 50% syllabus 25% videos, 25% simple terminology; expect nothing interesting for this section ## Performace Options \ In general we have a few options to increase performace in software; pipelining, parallelism, prediction. Parallelism/Pipelining \ * I'll just assume you know what this entail; one does many things at once; the other is like queues for processessing. * Prediction \ Yes this means interpreting potential outcomes/inputs/outputs etc. __BRANCHING__. We try to predict potentiality and account for it ahead of time.