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I've recently started exploring the field of computer architecture. While studying the instruction set architecture, I came across 'mov' instruction which copies data from one location to another. I understand that some type of mov' instructions are conditional while some need to have offset or displacement added to it to find a particular address, and hence they need ALU assistance. For e.g. Base-plus-index, Register relative, Base relative-plus-index, Scaled index etc.

I was wondering, if it is possible to bypass ALU for those mov' instructions (for e.g. register to register data transfer) who do not require any ALU assistance.

Sharvari
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Yes. Obviously, an instruction that doesn't require any arithmetic to be performed doesn't require the assistance of the ALU.

Obviously, though, it still requires the "intervention of microprocessor"; the registers, program counter, instruction fetch/decode/execute pipeline are all part of the CPU.

Oliver Charlesworth
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  • But since most CPUs have a MMU and mapped memory I think the number of instructions that *don't* require arthmetics for memory access is vanishingly small. – Joachim Sauer Sep 14 '11 at 08:10