Some of the fundamental considerations for instruction set design includes selection of:
- A set of data-types (For example: integers, long integers, doubles, character strings etc.).
- A set of operations on those data types.
- A set of instruction formats. Includes issues such as number of addresses or instruction length etc.
- A set of techniques for addressing data in memory or in registers.
- The number of registers that can be referenced by an instruction and how they are used.