Page 28 - UNI 101 Computer Science Handout.

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ability to execute these simple instructions at extremely high speeds, measured in millions or billions or

trillions of instructions executed per second. As you are already aware, it is necessary to translate high-

level language programs into the language of the machine for execution of the program to take place. It
may require tens or even hundreds of individual machine instructions to form the machine language

equivalent of a single high-level language statement. Program instructions are normally executed

sequentially, unless an instruction itself tells the computer to change the order of processing. The
instruction set used with a particular CPU is part of the design of the CPU and cannot normally be

executed on a different type of CPU unless the different CPU was designed to be instruction set

compatible. However, as you shall see, most instruction sets perform similar types of operations.

As a result, it is possible to write programs that will emulate the instruction set from one computer on
a computer with a different instruction set, although a program written for the original machine may

execute slowly on the machine with the emulator. The data that is manipulated by these instructions is

also stored in memory while being processed. The idea that the program instructions and data are both

stored in memory while being processed is known as the stored program concept. This important

concept is attributed primarily to John von Neumann, a famous computer scientist. It forms the basis for
the computer architecture that is standard to nearly every existing computer.

Figure 2 Von Neumann

28 Academic Year 2025/2026