Learning Malware Analysis

1.2 CPU

The Central Processing Unit (CPU) executes instructions (also called machine instructions). The instructions that the CPU executes are stored in the memory as a sequence of bytes. While executing the instructions, the required data (which is also stored as a sequence of bytes) is fetched from memory.

The CPU itself contains a small collection of memory within its chip, called the register set. The registers are used to store values fetched from memory during execution.