Registers are very much real, and their number being available at the ISA level will continue to matter regardless of the actual number of shadow registers. Be

Registers are very much real, and their number being available at the ISA level will continue to matter regardless of the actual number of shadow registers. Being able to store, e.g. 10 vs 5, local variables in a larger register file has performance implications[0] strong enough to consider larger register files an advantage. [0] The reduced number of memory-to-CPU and vice versa data transfers for transient computation results.