The first part of a machine language instruction, called the operation code , tells the computer what to do and matches a command in the instruction set. The second part of the instruction, called an operand , specifies the data or the location of the data that will be used by the instruction. Types of Processing T he CPU in most computers processes a single instruction at a time. The CPU waits until the instruction completes all four stages of the machine cycle before beginning to work on the next instruction. Pipelining speeds throughput by fetching a new instruction as soon as the preceding instruction moves on to the next stage.
Parallel processing uses multiple CPUs, which each work simultaneously on a portion of the problem.
Neural network computers apply specially designed circuits to simulate the way the human brain processes information, learns, and remembers.