A jump instruction is an instruction in a programming language, most commonly referring to an assembly language Central processing unit instruction that takes a memory address as an argument and upon execution the path of control goes to that address to find more CPU instructions to execute. In assembly this argument is specified as a label that can be some variable word. In machine language this label gets translated by the Assembler to some memory path (e.g. 0xFF45B4D1). An example would be as follows.

Start: mov %a1,0x61 add a1,a2 jmp Start

The Start: is a label. Start refers to the Memory_address where the next instruction ( mov a1, 0x61 ) is at. On execution the CPU would move the value of 0x61 into a1 (which is an Memory_address_register), then add the contents a1 and a2, and on the jump instruction ( jmp Start ) the CPU would go to the memory address Start where it would continue to execute the next instruction it found ( mov a1, 0x61 ).

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