2 ms·
By exposing it at the ISA level you save bits in every instruction through having the register addressing implicit in the instruction type.
by Symmetry 8y ago
By exposing it at the ISA level you save bits in every instruction through having the register addressing implicit in the instruction type.
- KMag 8y agoThat's only true if you replace, say, 32 integer and 32 fp registers with 64 registers. As I mentioned, very few functions require both a large number of fp and a large number of integer registers.
- Symmetry 8y agoYou were talking about high end processors with register renaming though, right? At that point you have stuff like L2 caches which take up way more transistors than the register file. And with one register file the space near it is going to be at a premium as you try to squeeze both the integer and floating point execution units near to it. But with separate clusters you can surround your integer register file with the integer bypass network and the integer execution resources and you can surround your floating point execution unit with your floating point execution units and bypass network. It's the same reason, mostly, that processors have split data/instruction L1 caches - you want to put the cache near the structures that use it.