Cycles for certain instructions

[Gareth <g.c.bransby-99@student.lboro.ac.uk>]

Hi,

I am doing an investigation with a mips malta board that has a 4kc processor on
it. I am trying to find out how many cycles certain instructions take to
execute.

The program I am running loops a small piece of code many times. After a few
loops of the code the caches will have all the instructions in them and so 
accesses to memory will be few and far between. So how many cycles do 
instructions such as load word and store word take? Obviosly if the data is not
in the cache the time take will depend on the speed of the external memory. If
the data is in the cache is the time taken fairly predictable for a given core?

Thanks
Gareth