Q. How steps of instruction execution can be broken down?
Let's explain how these steps of instruction execution can be broken down to micro-operations. To make easier this discussion let's presume that machine has structure as displayed in Figure below. Additionally let's also presume that instruction set of the machine has only two addressing modes indirect and direct memory addresses and a memory access take same time as that of a register access which is one clock cycle.
Instruction fetch: In this stage instruction is brought from address pointed by PC to instruction register.