What PUSH and POP Actually Do Inside a CPU

PUSH and POP are some of the most important instructions inside a CPU, but what do they actually do at the hardware level? In this video we follow the real microinstructions inside my custom RTM-16 CPU as a value is pushed onto the stack and then popped back off again. We step through: - The stack pointer - Register transfers - Memory addressing - The MAR register - Bus activity - Microcode execution - How PUSH and POP really work internally Rather than treating the stack as an abstract software concept, we follow the actual hardware operations controlling the CPU step by step. If you want to build the CPU yourself from logic gates all the way up to a working compiler, start with the Design a CPU playlist.