I'm a little confused as to how the PVM gets the cpu to carry out the bytecode instructions. I had read somewhere on StackOverflow that it doesn't convert byte-code to machine code, (alas, I can't find the thread now). 
Does it already have tons of pre-compiled machine instructions hard-coded that it runs/chooses one of those depending on the byte code?
Thank you.
If you mean Standard Python (CPython) by Python, then no! The byte-code (.pyc or .pyo files) are just a binary version of your code line by line, and is interpreted at run-time. But if you use pypy, yes! It has a JIT Compiler and it runs your byte-codeas like Java dn .NET (CLR).
Does the Python Virtual Machine (CPython) convert bytecode into machine language?