instruction set architecture

An instruction set is (a list of) all instructions, and all their variations, that a processor can execute.Instructions include:arithmetic such as add and subtractlogic instructions such as and, or, and notdata instructions such as move, input, output, load, and storecontrol flow instructions such as goto, if ... goto, call, and return.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), the native commands implemented by a particular CPU design.
See more at Wikipedia.org...

<architecture> (ISA) The parts of a processor's design that need to be understood in order to write assembly language, such as the machine language instructions and registers. Parts of the architecture that are left to the implementation, such as number of superscalar functional units, cache size and cycle speed, are not part of the ISA.
The definition of SPARC, for example, carefully distinguishes between an implementation and a specification.
(1999-01-16)