2 ms·

I think you'll find that cutting out 16 registers wins you less area than it costs you in code ROM; and at a given execution speed target, you'll be costing you

I think you'll find that cutting out 16 registers wins you less area than it costs you in code ROM; and at a given execution speed target, you'll be costing yourself in power and area to make up for it. There may be some kinds of software where this is not an issue, but for a lot of common types of software, 16 registers just keeps losing.

trasz 6y ago
It’s not about the die area, but rather the instruction encoding space. And because you can freely mix and match long and short instructions, in practice it doesn’t matter much.