It fetches instructions and facilitates program flow.

The processor can then speculatively fetch and execute instructions down one of the paths of the branch.

Dispatcher analyses the values from Program counter and fetches instructions, data into registers.

The potential of a faster CPU is wasted if it cannot fetch instructions and data as quickly as it can execute them.

Some coprocessors cannot fetch instructions from memory, execute program flow control instructions, do input/output operations, manage memory, and so on.

Thus the computers would generally have to fetch fewer instructions from the main memory, which could be made slower, smaller and less expensive for a given combination of speed and price.

Superscalar processors, which fetch multiple instructions per cycle and must have some form of branch prediction, do not benefit from delayed branches.

If the exception-producing instruction has not executed or the branch direction was predicted incorrectly, the processor will have fetched and executed instructions on a "wrong path."

The front end then fetches instructions in batches from the L1 cache and decodes them into the processor's internal instruction format.

They allow processors to fetch and execute instructions without waiting for a branch to be resolved.