For the hardware-curious, I found a good explanation of how an instruction is executed at the processor level here (though this page mostly focuses on opcode selection, which is also interesting).
The machine code stores an instruction such as 'mov' as an opcode. When the instruction is executed, the opcode is loaded into a dedicated register in the processor. Different bitfields in the opcode are wired to different pieces of control hardware - for example the control lines that tell the arithmetic logic unit whether to add or subtract, with carry or without, or selecting registers. Might not be super relevant but it's fun to know how things work!
For the hardware-curious, I found a good explanation of how an instruction is executed at the processor level here (though this page mostly focuses on opcode selection, which is also interesting).
The machine code stores an instruction such as 'mov' as an opcode. When the instruction is executed, the opcode is loaded into a dedicated register in the processor. Different bitfields in the opcode are wired to different pieces of control hardware - for example the control lines that tell the arithmetic logic unit whether to add or subtract, with carry or without, or selecting registers. Might not be super relevant but it's fun to know how things work!
http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.com/Windows/HTML/ISA.html