Criticism
Register windows are not the only way to improve register performance. The group at Stanford University designing the MIPS architecture saw the Berkeley work and decided that the problem was not a shortage of registers, but poor utilization of the existing ones. They instead invested more time in their compiler's register allocation, making sure it wisely used the larger set available in the MIPS instruction set. This resulted in reduced complexity of the chip, with one half the total number of registers, while offering potentially higher performance in those cases where a single procedure could make use of the larger visible register space. In the end, with modern compilers, the MIPS design makes better use of its register space even during procedure calls.
Read more about this topic: Register Window
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