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Flynn's Taxonomy Classifier

Flynn (1966) sorts every machine by two questions: how many instruction streams and how many data streams run at once? Flip the two switches and see which of the four categories you've built.

Instruction streams

Data streams

SISD

Single Instruction, Single Data

	Single Data	Multiple Data
Single Instruction	SISD	SIMD
Multiple Instruction	MISD	MIMD

Single Data

Multiple Data

Single Instruction

SISD

SIMD

Multiple Instruction

MISD

MIMD

Remember: most real machines you'll meet are MIMD (multicore CPUs, clusters), and the GPU that runs your games and AI is SIMD. MISD is the rare one — think redundant, fault-tolerant systems.