In the Intel-AMD CPUs, there are separate register files for renaming the 16 general-purpose registers (which will become 32 registers in Intel Nova Lake and Di

In the Intel-AMD CPUs, there are separate register files for renaming the 16 general-purpose registers (which will become 32 registers in Intel Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids, by the end of this year) and for renaming the 16 (AVX) or 32 (AVX-512) vector registers. Both register files have a few hundred of scalar, respectively vector registers. Besides these 2 big register files, there are a few other registers for renaming some special registers, e.g. the flags register and the AVX-512 mask registers. Between the general-purpose registers there are no renaming differences, any of the 16 registers can be mapped to any of the hundreds of hidden registers, regardless if the register name used in the program is RAX, RCX or whatever. Some differences between apparently similar instructions may be caused not by the fact that they use RAX or another register, but by whether they affect the flags or not, because the number of renaming registers available for flags is much smaller than the hundreds available for GPRs.