A CPU has a five-stage pipeline and runs at 1 GHz frequency. Instruction fetch happens in the first stage of the pipeline. A conditional branch instruction computes the target address and evaluates the condition in the third stage of the pipeline. The processor stops fetching new instructions following a conditional branch until the branch outcome is known. A program executes 10⁹ instructions out of which 20% are conditional branches. If each instruction takes one cycle to complete on average, the total execution time of the program is:
a. 1.0 second
b. 1.2 seconds
c. 1.4 seconds
d. 1.6 seconds
