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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Branch" computer science – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Machine code General concepts Instruction set Opcode Illegal opcode Opcode table Operand Instructions NOP Branch Indirect branch vte A branch is an instruction in a computer program that can cause a computer to begin executing a different instruction sequence and thus deviate from its default behavior of executing instructions in order.[a] Branch (or branching, branched) may also refer to the act of switching execution to a different instruction sequence as a result of executing a branch instruction. Branch instructions are used to implement control flow in program loops and conditionals (i.e., executing a particular sequence of instructions only if certain conditions are satisfied).
A branch instruction can be either an unconditional branch, which always results in branching, or a conditional branch, which may or may not cause branching depending on some condition. Also, depending on how it specifies the address of the new instruction sequence (the "target" address), a branch instruction is generally classified as direct, indirect or relative, meaning that the instruction contains the target address, or it specifies where the target address is to be found (e.g., a register or memory location), or it specifies the difference between the current and target addresses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_(computer_science)
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