China Developing its Own CPU Instruction Set Architecture China has been looking to become self-sufficient in the semiconductor industry, and has recently announced its own Instruction Set Architecture. What is an ISA, why does China want to be self-sufficient, and what do we currently know about the new ISA? What is an ISA? An Instruction Set Architecture, or ISA, describes the registers, instruction, and memory model of a CPU. Still, it does not describe the physical implementation (i.e. how the chip implements the instructions). Two processors can be constructed in a fundamentally different way (such as Intel and AMD). Still, if both use the same ISA then they will be able to execute code identically.