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Re:Ginseng: Keeping secrets in registers when you distrust t... by bluGill on Friday April 05, 2019 @04:53PM (#19586933)
Back when AMD designed x86_64 asked that question: they concluded that it was better only show a few registers because that was all compilers really needed (compilers writers had learned a lot of tricks from the mess that x86 was), and so they could better deal with a small instruction set that fewer registers offers for greater performance.
Re:Ginseng: Keeping secrets in registers when you distrust t... by ahartmetz on Sunday April 07, 2019 @07:20AM (#19596122)
But AMD also increased the number of general-purpose registers from ~6 in x86 (eax to edx and the not fully general purpose esi, edi, esp, ebp) to ~16 in AMD64 (rax to r16). ARM has ~32.
Re:Ginseng: Keeping secrets in registers when you distrust t... by MuffinFlavored on Saturday April 06, 2019 @07:39PM (#19593730)
> from the mess that x86 was

Is ARM seen as a mess? Are x86's days numbered as ARM catches up and becomes more widespread for personal computing devices?

Re:Ginseng: Keeping secrets in registers when you distrust t... by bluGill on Monday April 08, 2019 @10:34AM (#19605545)
ARM is much better as an instruction set, but it isn't clear if that will ever matter.