Instruction Set

An instruction set, or instruction set architecture (ISA), is the part of the computer architecture related to programming, including the native data types, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O. An ISA includes a specification of the set of opcodes (machine language), and the native commands implemented by a particular processor.

Instruction set architecture is distinguished from the microarchitecture, which is the set of processor design techniques used to implement the instruction set. Computers with different microarchitectures can share a common instruction set. For example, the Intel Pentium and the AMD Athlon implement nearly identical versions of the x86 instruction set, but have radically different internal designs.

Some virtual machinesthat support bytecode for Smalltalk, the Java virtual machine, and Microsoft's Common Language Runtime virtual machine as their ISA implement it by translating the bytecode for commonly used code paths into native machine code, and executing less-frequently-used code paths by interpretation; Transmeta implemented the x86 instruction set atop VLIW processors in the same fashion.