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The program counter (PC), [1] commonly called the instruction pointer (IP) in Intel x86 and Itanium microprocessors, and sometimes called the instruction address register (IAR), [2] [1] the instruction counter, [3] or just part of the instruction sequencer, [4] is a processor register that indicates where a computer is in its program sequence.
The program counter (PC) is a register that holds the memory address of the next instruction to be executed. After each instruction copy to the memory address register (MAR), the PC can either increment the pointer to the next sequential instruction, jump to a specified pointer, or branch conditionally to a specified pointer. [2]
A computer program is a sequence or set [a] of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. It is one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. [1] A computer program in its human-readable form is called source code.
This Program Counter is normally incremented by 1 after each instruction is executed, allowing the Little Man to work through a program sequentially. Branch instructions allow iteration (loops) and conditional programming structures to be incorporated into a program. The latter is achieved by setting the Program Counter to a non-sequential ...
r15 is the program counter, and not usable as a general purpose register; r13 is the stack pointer; r8–r13 can be switched out for others (banked) on a processor mode switch. Older versions had 26-bit addressing, [35] and used upper bits of the program counter (r15) for status flags, making that register 32-bit. ARM 32-bit (Thumb) 8: 16
These "in-flight" instructions can retire at any time, depending on memory access, hits in cache, stalls in the pipeline and many other factors. This can cause performance counter events to be attributed to the wrong instructions, making precise performance analysis difficult or impossible. AMD introduced methods to mitigate some of these ...
The program counter is typically set to a hard coded value when the CPU is first powered on, and will hence execute whatever machine code happens to be at this address. Similarly, the program counter can be set to execute whatever machine code is at some arbitrary address, even if this is not valid machine code. This will typically trigger an ...
In computing, the instruction register (IR) or current instruction register (CIR) is the part of a CPU's control unit that holds the instruction currently being executed or decoded. [1]