NOP: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

This article is about the NOP assembly language mnemonic. NOP also stands for National Opinion Polls, a public opinion polling company in the UK.

In most assembly languages, NOP (short for No OPeration) is an instruction that does nothing at all during the clock cycles it is executed – it makes no changes to memory or program status. NOPs are most commonly used for timing purposes, to force memory alignment, to prevent hazards, or as a "place-holder" to be replaced by active instructions later on in program development. In the list given below, an example of NOP instruction characteristics for a specific CPU family is given:

Intel x86 information:

• Mnemonic: NOP
• Clock cycles: 3
• Bytes: 1
• Opcode: 0x90