Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)

Question

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what ISAs are. Is it just the way a CPU is made? I’ve read it’s like a CPUs “vocabulary”. So if the vocabulary comparison is correct, AMD and Intel CPUs are kind of the same since they are both X86 right?

In: 1

Answer 1

The vocabulary analogy is about right, and yes, AMD and Intel are just two vendors who both make CPUs using the x86 instruction set. A windows program will work on an Intel CPU or an AMD CPU just fine. But run that program on, say, ARM, and things will fail to work properly since that’s its own instruction set.