High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The program counter (PC), commonly called the instruction pointer (IP) in Intel x86 microprocessors, and sometimes called the instruction address register, or just part of the instruction sequencer in some computers, is a processor register that indicates where the computer is in its instruction sequence. Depending on the details of the particular computer, the PC or IP holds either the memory address of the instruction being executed, or the address of the next instruction to be executed.