Program Counter

Definitions

1. A CPU register that holds the memory address of the next instruction to be executed. After each instruction fetch, the program counter is automatically incremented (or modified by a branch/jump instruction) to point to the subsequent instruction. Also called the instruction pointer (IP) on x86 architectures.

   In plain English: A tiny piece of the processor that keeps track of which instruction the computer should run next, like a bookmark in a recipe.

   Example: "The debugger shows the program counter sitting at the faulting address — looks like we jumped into unmapped memory."

Related Terms

• Mnemonic
• Opcode
• L1 Cache
• L2 Cache
• L3 Cache
• Machine Instruction
• Memory Alignment
• Performance Counter
• Spectre
• X86