THE education site for computer science and ICT
3. Software and the CPU
There are two requirements for any software or computer instruction.
- A person must be able to write and understand it
- A computer must be able to carry it out.
But these two requirements are very different.
A computer can only operate with pure binary numbers (bit patterns) such as
| Instructions | Data | ||
| 1110111100101110 1000111011101010 1001011111000111 0111001111100101 | 1011111010101110 0000111011101010 1110111110001100 1011001111100101 |
It does not matter if the bit patterns are instructions or data - they must both be in binary form.
This set of bit patterns is called machine code and it is how a computer handles information within the CPU.
These bit patterns will make little or no sense to a computer programmer.
The movie below shows a CPU manipulating data internally
Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you
Click on this link: what is machine code