As simple as a processor’s instruction set may seem, especially in a 1978-era one like the Intel 8086, there is quite a bit going on to go from something like a conditional jump instruction to a set ...

The registers inside the CPU, the machine code instruction set, and the ways in which the instructions interact with the registers and status flags are all intertwined. As you may recall, one of my ...

If you are limiting yourself to only 16 instructions, which ones should you chose, and how do you manage without the ones that fall by the wayside? In my previous column on our project to build a ...

How many instructions do you need to successfully compile C code? Let’s see, you’d need some jump instructions, some arithmetic functions, and — of course — move instructions, right? Turns out you ...