The MIPS instruction set is rich in nops, since any instruction with zero as a destination is guaranteed to do nothing.

2004, Patterson et al, Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface
Notice that in computing CPI or IPC, we do not count any nops executed as useful instructions.

For example, if there is a CALL 3140 and we want to skip this call, we can NOP it out.

Worse, some patching can result in codes which cannot be executed: for example nopping the load which provides the value for the denominator of a division can result in a division by zero.

Nop

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