Instruction Fetch

Also IF for short. State in the Instruction Pipeline .

Figure 1: Detailed schematic of the IF stage.

For performace:
- one fetch every cycle
- fetch can return multiple instructions for Superscalar Processor :

Also Contains:
- Branch Predictor
- Instruction cache
- Return Address Stack

For the BTB #

See Branch Target Buffer
For each instruction in the fetched instructin block:
- determine if it is a branch and if it is:
  - determine type (conditional, call, return)
  - determine target address if branch is taken