All computer architectures provide more than one of these addressing modes. The question arises as to how the control unit can determine which addressing mode is being used in a particular instruction. Several approaches are used. Often, different opcodes will use different addressing modes. Also, one or more bits in the instruction format can be used as a mode field. The value of the mode field determines which addressing mode is to be used.

What is the interpretation of effective address. In a system without virtual memory, the effective address will be either a main memory address or a register. In a virtual memory system, the effective address is a virtual address or a register. The actual mapping to a physical address is a function of the paging mechanism and is invisible to the programmer.

To explain the addressing modes, we use the following notation: