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architectural state

Everything the instruction set promises a program can see: the registers, the flags, the program counter and memory. Two different processors running the same program must agree on it after every instruction.

Architectural state is the processor state defined by the ISA (general-purpose and floating-point registers, flags, program counter, memory); a microarchitecture may hold much more state internally, but must make every instruction's effect on architectural state appear in program order.

See also

program counter microarchitecture pipeline flush
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