What's the purpose of the CIL nop opcode?

Question

I\'m going through MSIL and noticing there are a lot of nop instructions in the MSIL.

The MSDN article says they take no action and are used to fill space if the opc

Answer 1

It may also make code run faster, when optimizing for specific processors or architectures:

Processors for a long time employ multiple pipelines that work roughly in parallel, so two independent instruction can be exceuted at the same time. On a simple processor with two pipelines, the first may support all instructions, whereas the second supports only a subset. Also, there are some stalls between the pipelines when one has to wait for the result of a previous instruction that isn't finished yet.

Under these circumstances, a dedicated nop may force the next instruction into a specific pipeline (the first, or not the first), and improve the pairing of following instructions so that the cost of the nop is more than amortized.