The Art of Picking Intel Registers (2003)

Re:The Art of Picking Intel Registers (2003) by userbinator on Monday April 23, 2018 @12:07AM (#16900447)

Most of the early computers were accumulator-based; and the concept predates computers, since the early mechanical calculators had a single "register" --- the accumulator --- which... accumulated the results of successive calculation. It's no surprise that computers, which initially were developed to be essentially automatic calculators, adopted the same architecture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmometer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comptometer

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Re:The Art of Picking Intel Registers (2003) by adrianratnapala on Monday April 23, 2018 @03:07AM (#16901099)

I suspect it was also rational, given the performance trade-offs at the time.

As transistors have become smaller, the caching hierarchy has become more important. A modern register set is a level-0 cache -- i.e. a useful pool of memory that is really close to the the computation units.

In the old days, the communication between components was less of a bottleneck than the speed of the components themselves. So there was less advantage to this. On the other hand, making a CPU simpler by having just one or two registers was more of an advantage than it is now.

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