What Does Program Counter Mean?

Program counter is a special memory location. It is a register in a computer processor. It includes the address of the next instruction to be fetched and executed. A program counter keep track of where in the program the computer is currently executing. It is located in the control unit of the CPU. It is also known by the names of sequence counter register and instruction pointer.

It holds also the address of the order being executed, or the address of the subsequently instruction to be executed depending on the details of that particular PC. It has the capacity of automatically incrementing after each instrument cycle so that the instructions can be retrieved in a sequence. The instruction pointer gets incremented immediately after a program instruction is fetched in most of the processors.