Opcodes

In computing, an opcode (abbreviated from operation code, also known as instruction syllable, instruction parcel or opstring) is the portion of a machine language instruction that specifies the operation to be performed. Beside the opcode itself, most instructions also specify the data they will process, in the form of operands. In addition to opcodes used in the instruction set architectures of various CPUs, which are hardware devices, they can also be used in abstract computing machines as part of their byte code specifications.

Specifications and format of the opcodes are laid out in the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the processor in question, which may be a general CPU or a more specialized processing unit. Apart from the opcode itself, an instruction normally also has one or more specifiers for operands (i.e. data) on which the operation should act, although some operations may have implicit operands, or none at all. There are instruction sets with nearly uniform fields for opcode and operand specifiers, as well as others (the x86 architecture for instance) with a more complicated, variable-length structure.

Depending on architecture, the operands may be register values, values in the stack, other memory values, I/O ports, etc., specified and accessed using more or less complex addressing modes. The types of operations include arithmetics, data copying, logical operations, and program control, as well as special instructions (such as CPUID and others).

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