> Seems to me that 'registers' are just really fast memory locations that get referenced by a 'stunted' address space in order to fit into most instructions. In

> Seems to me that 'registers' are just really fast memory locations that get referenced by a 'stunted' address space in order to fit into most instructions. In other words, this is not a conceptual necessity. It exists because it's hard to build HW which can access all memory locations really fast. Registers are unavoidable. Even if you could directly address the whole memory space on every instruction, even if it was all "really fast", the hardware would still need to read the input operands from memory into internal registers, and store the result into an internal register before writing to memory.