microcode

[WrigleyF]

Is microcode something that's good to learn, or is this something you'd only need to know if you were a professional programmer?

[auryn]

Microcode is a layer of hardware-level instructions and/or data structures involved in the implementation of higher level machine code instructions in many computers and other processors; it resides in a special high-speed memory and translates machine instructions into sequences of detailed circuit-level operations.

Microcode - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia