Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors
by als0 on Sunday December 17, 2023 @04:29AM
(#38671578)
What about if you use register windows or special renaming of architectural registers to internal ones? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_window
Re:Intel, Samsung, and TSMC Demo 3D-Stacked Transistors
by Nevermark on Sunday December 17, 2023 @11:58PM
(#38679390)
The amount of stack in the L1 cache is essentially that. A shifting fast access working memory area.
Then think of registers as just part of the fetch & store pipelines for staging operations on stack values.
Forth goes all in with this approach.
Once you have enough registers, having more mean lowers active utilization for any given instruction (bad use of space, vs. fast pipelined access to cached stack) or higher levels of parallel instruction dispatch (much greater complexity, and even greater inefficiency for branching misses).
Then you have to update instruction sets, which could be impossible given how tightly they fit in current instruction sizes.
Ergo, increasing register banks is a major architecture & platform change from hardware to software redesign, with heavy end user impact, and a fair chance of decreasing performance.
In contrast, anything that improves caching performance is a big non-disruptive win.