An instruction set, or instruction set architecture (ISA), is the part of the computer architecture related to programming, including the native data types, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O. An ISA includes a specification of the set of opcodes (machine language), the native commands implemented by a particular CPU design.
Instruction set architecture is distinguished from the microarchitecture, which is the set of processor design techniques used to implement the instruction set. Computers with different microarchitectures can share a common instruction set. For example, the Intel Pentium and the AMD Athlon implement nearly identical versions of the x86 instruction set, but have radically different internal designs.
This concept can be extended to unique ISAs like TIMI (Technology-Independent Machine Interface) present in the IBM System/38 and IBM AS/400. TIMI is an ISA that is implemented as low-level software and functionally resembles what is now referred to as a virtual machine. It was designed to increase the longevity of the platform and applications written for it, allowing the entire platform to be moved to very different hardware without having to modify any software except that which comprises TIMI itself. This allowed IBM to move the AS/400 platform from an older CISC architecture to the newer POWER architecture without having to recompile any parts of the OS or software associated with it. Nowadays there are several open source Operating Systems which could be easily ported on any existing general purpose CPU, because the compilation is the essential part of their design (e.g. new software installation).