Quiz submission record for quiz5-1-1 at Mon Jul 19 03:48:15 2004:

Your Answer for Question 1:
From a hardware perspective, it's beneficial for simplicity and regularity because simple hardware is both cheaper and faster.  By having physically simpler hardware, we have to use fewer materials to construct the unit.  Complex hardware is not desirable because they physically take up a lot of space, and thus all calculations would generally take longer because signals have to travel further.

Your Answer for Question 2:
The RegWrite signal in the book controls when data is written to the specified write register.  It must be asserted for a write to occur at the clock edge.

Your Answer for Question 3:
The purpose of the adder is to compute the branch target address - it adds the sign extended immediate field of the instruction after 2 left shifts to the incremented PC.  The ALU does the comparison for the branch and outputs 0 or 1 accordingly.  It's probably possible for a single ALU to do both functions since ALUs can do any arithmetic operations, but we would probably have to add delays and extra registers to make it work because everything is timed by the clock.  It's probably better to have things happen almost simultaneously.


Your unique submission ID is quiz5-1-1-cs61c-ck-1090234095-1417.