If registers are so blazingly fast, why don't we have more of them?
In 32bit, we had 8 "general purpose" registers. With 64bit, the amount doubles, but it seems independent of the 64bit change itself. Now, if registers are so fast (no memory access), why aren't there more of them naturally? Shouldn't CPU builders work as many registers as possible into the CPU? What is the logical restriction to why we only have the amount we have? There's many reasons you don't just have a huge number of registers: They're highly linked to most pipeline stages. For starters, you need to track their lifetime, and forward results back to previous stages. The complexity gets