About
An Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) describe the computer architecture at the highest level. It's the design of an environment that implements an instruction set.
An ISA is implemented by a programmable device, the most common being the Cpu.
It is the part of the processor that is visible to the programmer or compiler writer.
Instruction set architecture is the structure of a computer that a machine language programmer (or a compiler) must understand to write a correct (timing independent) program for that machine
Instruction sets may be categorized by the maximum number of operands explicitly specified in instructions. Ie:
- 1-operand machine
- 2-operand machine
- …
See operand number
Component
It's a runtime environment similar to interpreters of high-level languages.
The design includes:
- all the instructions (See Instruction - Instruction Set (Device Language)),
- memory models (how memory are arranged to be used by programs),
- I/O, etc., of
a CPU.
The instruction set architecture consists of:
- native data types,
- memory architecture,
- interrupt
- exception handling,
- and external I/O.
The ISA defines the machine code that a processor reads and acts upon as well as the word size, memory address modes, processor registers, and data type.
List
- Intel-32 processors like Pentium
See
To get this information via an operating system, see