4 ms·
Probably physical register file as referenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_file. PRF in this context re
by otherjason 6y ago
Probably physical register file as referenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_file. PRF in this context refers to the actual memory that contains all of the register data, which can be much larger than the number of architectural registers to provide for register renaming, which can help performance (basically, the mapping from architectural register names to actual physical registers continually changes so you relieve the bottleneck of waiting for a particular physical register to become available).
- Sharlin 6y agoAh, probably. I thought "private" might also make sense, in that it's an implementation detail hidden behind the architectural register set.
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoPRF = Physical Register File. In modern CPUs, there are no separate architectural registers, all register state is held in a single very large register file (for example, 180 entries in Intel Skylake) that contains all register data, and the architectural register names are pointers into this file. This is different from previous approaches where in-flight register data was held in the ROB and later written back into architectural registers.