Konekäsky

Konekäsky is a Finnish term that translates to "machine command" or "instruction" in English. It refers to a fundamental unit of operation that a computer's central processing unit (CPU) can understand and execute. These commands are the lowest level of programming, representing basic arithmetic operations, data movement, logic checks, and control flow instructions.

Machine commands are typically represented in binary code, a series of ones and zeros, which is directly interpretable by the CPU's circuitry. When a program is compiled or assembled, high-level programming language code is translated into a sequence of these machine commands specific to the target processor architecture. The CPU fetches these commands from memory one by one, decodes them, and then performs the specified action.

The set of all possible machine commands that a particular CPU can execute is known as its instruction set architecture (ISA). Different CPU families, such as x86 or ARM, have distinct ISAs, meaning a program compiled for one architecture will not run on a CPU with a different ISA without translation or emulation. Understanding konekäsky is crucial for computer scientists and engineers working on low-level programming, operating systems, and hardware design.