The trap on overflow will need to compute said overflow flag. Yep, it is not a register. Yep, you still have to compute it. And here you again pay for things th

The trap on overflow will need to compute said overflow flag. Yep, it is not a register. Yep, you still have to compute it. And here you again pay for things that are 1) infrequent and 2) mostly statically inferred. The Alphas were faster than MIPS due to manual design. Instead of using standard components they laid everything out by hand and they often used domino logic, AFAIK. Classic five stage pipeline MIPS implemented with domino logic can easily get 1GHz (twice as fast as direct synthesis). Domino logic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_logic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_logic And software would benefit from static error checking much more than from hardware support for integer overflow.