A compiler AND processor design amateur here. (Latter in school.) Once you have enough registers, having more mean lowers active utilization for any given inst

A compiler AND processor design amateur here. (Latter in school.) Once you have enough registers, having more mean lowers active utilization for any given instruction (bad use of space, vs. fast pipelined access to cached stack) or higher levels of parallel instruction dispatch (much greater complexity, and even greater inefficiency for branching misses). Then you have to update instruction sets, which could be impossible given how tightly they fit in current instruction sizes. Ergo, increasing register banks is a major architecture & platform change from hardware to software redesign, with heavy end user impact, and a fair chance of decreasing performance. In contrast, anything that improves caching performance is a big non-disruptive win.