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> On the contrary, what then are the disadvantages of the CLZ instruction being included in the ARM9? If any?Well it probably takes a few extra gates to decode the instruction, but other than that not much...
For general purpose code it is commonly used for integer normalization (placing the MSB of the integer at a known location). In more practical terms normalized integers are used for optimized Newton-Raphson software integer division, as Jacob mentioned, but also things like integer to floating point conversion, and bit-field priority decoders.
But how many clock cycles does CLZ require to execute???