It appears to be common nomenclature dating back to the 1960s-70s [1] to refer to the registers in a CPU as a single "file" in RAM, although the term "file" den

It appears to be common nomenclature dating back to the 1960s-70s [1] to refer to the registers in a CPU as a single "file" in RAM, although the term "file" denotes the fact that you can access multiple parts of it at once. From [2]: "A register file is a critical component of a modern superscalar processor. It has a large number of entries and read/write ports in order to enable high levels of instruction parallelism." You might want to think of a register file as "a group of registers with several (parallel) input/output ports", as opposed to a component which can only perform a single read/write at a time. Basically, a really fast multi-channel RAM which can do simultaneous reads/writes. The number of read/write ports is usually dictated by your hardware, instruction set, parallelism, and scheduling [3] [4]. ---- [1] Bollesen, V.; , "Core memories," Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.6, no.3, pp. 534- 535, Sep 1970 [2] Gonzalez, R.; Cristal, A.; Ortega, D.; Veidenbaum, A.; Valero, M.; , "A content aware integer register file organization," Computer Architecture, 2004. Proceedings. 31st Annual International Symposium on , vol., no., pp. 314- 324, 19-23 June 2004. [3] Wallace, S.; Bagherzadeh, N.; , "A scalable register file architecture for dynamically scheduled processors," Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, 1996., Proceedings of the 1996 Conference on , vol., no., pp.179-184, Oct 1996 [4] Balasubramonian, R.; Dwarkadas, S.; Albonesi, D.H.; , "Reducing the complexity of the register file in dynamic superscalar processors," Microarchitecture, 2001. MICRO-34. Proceedings. 34th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on , vol., no., pp. 237- 248, 1-5 Dec. 2001