Front panel of an IBM 701 computer introduced in 1952. Lights in the middle display the contents of various registers. The instruction counter is at the lower left.

The program counter (PC), commonly called the instruction pointer (IP) in Intel x86 and Itanium microprocessors, and sometimes called the instruction address register (IAR)^[1] or just part of the instruction sequencer,^[2] is a processor register that indicates where a computer is in its program sequence.

In most processors, PC is incremented after fetching an instruction, and holds the memory address of (“points to”) the next instruction that would be executed. (In a processor where the incrementation precedes the fetch, PC points to the current instruction being executed.)

Instructions are usually fetched sequentially from memory, but control transfer instructions change the sequence by placing a new value in PC. These include branches (sometimes called jumps), subroutine calls, and returns. A transfer that is conditional on the truth of some assertion lets the computer follow a different sequence under different conditions.

A branch provides that the next instruction is fetched from somewhere else in memory. A subroutine call not only branches but saves the preceding contents of PC somewhere. A return retrieves the saved contents of PC and places it back in PC, resuming sequential execution with the instruction following the subroutine call.

Hardware implementation

In a typical central processing unit (CPU), PC is a binary counter (which is the origin of the term program counter) that may be one of many registers in the CPU hardware. The instruction cycle^[3] begins with a fetch, in which the CPU places the value of PC on the address bus to send it to the memory. The memory responds by sending the contents of that memory location on the data bus. (This is the stored-program computer model, in which executable instructions are stored alongside ordinary data in memory, and handled identically by it^[4]). Following the fetch, the CPU proceeds to execution, taking some action based on the memory contents that it obtained. At some point in this cycle, PC will be modified so that the next instruction executed is a different one (typically, incremented so that the next instruction is the one at the next sequential memory address).

Like other processor registers, PC may be a bank of binary latches, each one representing one bit of the value of PC.^[5] The number of bits (the width of PC) relates to the processor architecture. For instance, a “32-bit” CPU may use 32 bits to be able to address 2³² units of memory. If PC is a binary counter, it may increment when a pulse is applied to its COUNT UP input, or the CPU may compute some other value and load it into PC by a pulse to its LOAD input.^[6]

To identify the current instruction, PC may be combined with other registers that identify a segment or page. This approach permits a PC with fewer bits by assuming that most memory units of interest are within the current vicinity.

Consequences in machine architecture

Use of a PC that normally increments assumes that what a computer does is execute a usually linear sequence of instructions. Such a PC (or equivalent hardware that serves the same purpose^[7]) is central to the von Neumann architecture. Thus programmers write a sequential control flow even for algorithms that do not have to be sequential. The resulting “von Neumann bottleneck” led to research into parallel computing,^[8] including non-von Neumann or dataflow models that did not use a PC; for example, rather than specifying sequential steps, the high-level programmer might specify desired function and the low-level programmer might specify this using combinatory logic.

This research also led to ways to making conventional, PC-based, CPUs run faster, including:

• Pipelining, in which different hardware in the CPU executes different phases of multiple instructions simultaneously.
• The very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture, where a single instruction can achieve multiple effects.
• Techniques to predict out-of-order execution and prepare subsequent instructions for execution outside the regular sequence.

Consequences in high-level programming

Modern high-level programming languages still follow the sequential-execution model and, indeed, a common way of identifying programming errors is with a “procedure execution” in which the programmer's finger identifies the point of execution as a PC would. The high-level language is essentially the machine language of a virtual machine,^[9] too complex to be built as hardware but instead emulated or interpreted by software.

However, new programming models transcend sequential-execution programming:

• When writing a multi-threaded program, the programmer may write each thread as a sequence of instructions without specifying the timing of any instruction relative to instructions in other threads.
• In an integrated development environment, the programmer may write sequences of instructions to respond to events without specifying an overall sequence for the program.

See also

• Branch prediction
• Instruction cache
• Instruction cycle
• Instruction unit
• Instruction pipeline
• Instruction register
• Instruction scheduling
• Out-of-order execution
• Program status word

References

External links

• http://code.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#1plSxYlzhvw/trunk/projects/work/design/program_counter.vhdl