Editing Classic RISC pipeline (section)

===Instruction fetch===
The instructions reside in memory that takes one cycle to read.  This memory can be dedicated to SRAM, or an Instruction [[Cache (computing)|Cache]].  The term "latency" is used in computer science often and means the time from when an operation starts until it completes.  Thus, instruction fetch has a latency of one [[clock cycle]] (if using single-cycle SRAM or if the instruction was in the cache).  Thus, during the [[Instruction fetch|Instruction Fetch]] stage, a 32-bit instruction is fetched from the instruction memory.

The [[program counter]] (PC) is a register that holds the address that is presented to the instruction memory. The address is presented to instruction memory at the start of a cycle. Then during the cycle, the instruction is read out of instruction memory, and at the same time, a calculation is done to determine the next PC. The next PC is calculated by incrementing the PC by 4, and by choosing whether to take that as the next PC or to take the result of a branch/jump calculation as the next PC.  Note that in classic RISC, all instructions have the same length. (This is one thing that separates RISC from CISC<ref>{{cite web |first=David |last=Patterson| title=RISC I: A Reduced Instruction Set VLSI Computer |series=Isca '81|date=12 May 1981|pages=443–457|url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/800052.801895}}</ref>).  In the original RISC designs, the size of an instruction is 4 bytes, so always add 4 to the instruction address, but don't use PC + 4 for the case of a taken branch, jump, or exception (see '''delayed branches''', below).  (Note that some modern machines use more complicated algorithms ([[branch prediction]] and [[branch target predictor|branch target prediction]]) to guess the next instruction address.)