A 5 stage pipelined CPU has the following sequence of stages:

IF — Instruction fetch from instruction memory,
RD — Instruction decode and register read,
EX — Execute: ALU operation for data and address computation,
MA — Data memory access - for write access, the register read
     at RD stage is used,
WB — Register write back.
Consider the following sequence of instructions:
I1 : L R0, 1oc1;        R0 <= M[1oc1]
I2 : A R0, R0;           R0 <= R0 + R0
I3 : S R2, R0;           R2 <= R2 - R0
Let each stage take one clock cycle.

What is the number of clock cycles taken to complete the above sequence of instructions starting from the fetch of I1 ?
(A) 8
(B) 10
(C) 12
(D) 15


Answer: (A)

Explanation:
If we use operand forwarding from memory stage :

If we don’t use operand forwarding :

Thus, clock cycles = 8 / 11
Since, 11 is not in the option. So, clock cycles = 8.

 
Thus, option (A) is correct.

 
Please comment below if you find anything wrong in the above post.

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