Hardwired into a CPU's circuitry is a set of basic operations it can perform, called an instruction set. Such operations may involve, for example, adding or subtracting two numbers, comparing two numbers, or jumping to a different part of a program. Each basic operation is represented by a particular combination of bits, known as the machine language opcode; while executing instructions in a machine language program, the CPU decides which operation to perform by "decoding" the opcode. A complete machine language instruction consists of an opcode and, in many cases, additional bits that specify arguments for the operation (for example, the numbers to be summed in the case of an addition operation). Going up the complexity scale, a machine language program is a collection of machine language instructions that the CPU executes. The actual mathematical operation for each instruction is performed by a combinational logic circuit within the CPU's processor known as the arit...
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