Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
[snip]
Gabriel Sechan wrote:
Large register stacks take a lot of chip space, and increase the
transistor count elsewhere as well. When you have limited die space,
you can't have everything. These days cache is more of an issue than
registers, but in the old days the registers were the big transistor
count users. Hence the 6 register intel architecture.
Just one of the reasons I loathe the intel architecture.
Um, I thought that x86_64 had finally broken out of this? Am I wrong?
Yes, you are wrong. Gabe is also wrong. The x386 has 8 general purpose
registers, not six [1]. The AMD64 architecture has 16 general purpose
registers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 for general info. In
addition to the general purpose registers, the x86/x86-64 family also
has numerous special purpose registers which make programming less
onerous. Or maybe more so depending on your abilities. Few people have
to work at that low a level.
Gus
[1] Ref: "Personal Computer Microprocessors Data Book", AMD 1992, page 1-209
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