The Y86 architecture has 8 32-bit registers, 3 condition codes (ZF, SF, OF), a program counter (PC), and up to 4GB of memory. It supports normal, register, and displacement addressing modes. Instructions include arithmetic, logical operations, jumps, calls, returns, and memory load/store. The execution cycle fetches, decodes, executes, and updates the PC for each instruction. Condition codes track the results of arithmetic operations for conditional jumps.