Quiz submission record for quiz5-1-1 at Sun Jul 18 22:35:28 2004:

Your Answer for Question 1:
Instruction set regularity and simplicity reduces hardware complexity which can lead to faster clock speeds and lower production costs.  There doesn't have to be much special hardware set aside to determine which instruction to do or have specialized hardware to carry out specific instructions.  Because MIPS is regular and simple, many portions of the processor can be reused for many different operations.

Your Answer for Question 2:
The RegWrite signal is a clock to help ensures all the writes are edge-triggered.

Your Answer for Question 3:
This add unit helps compute the branch target address of a branch instruction.  It would be possible to use a single ALU to do the functions of both the adder and the ALU but this would come at a performance cost and possibly hardware cost.  Since the ALU can only performance one operation at a time, a single ALU would have to compute the branch condition and the target address one after the other. While computing the second item, it must "remember" the first answer, which would require some state elements. 


Your unique submission ID is quiz5-1-1-cs61c-cj-1090215328-3131.