The Instruction Set

• The set of instructions required to make a CPU useful can be grouped into several categories:

  1.

  Memory Operations for reading and writing from the main memory

  2.

  Arithmetic and logic operations for manipulating operands

  3.

  Operations affecting the program counter

• Instructions are encoded in binary form to be storable in the computer's memory.
• Instructions specify both the operation to be performed as well as the operands.
• Instructions can be expressed in assembly language to be human readable.
• Assembly language is simply a human-readable form of the binary instructions.