The design of MIPS provides 32 generalpurpose registers and

The design of MIPS provides 32 general-purpose registers and 32 floating-point registers. If registers are good, are more registers better? List and discuss as many trade-offs as you can.

Solution

The design of MIPS provides 32 general-purpose registers and 32 floating-point registers. So,it has both advantages and disadvantages :

- Here, due to large no. of general purpose register and floating point registers, we use these registers compare to the memory , so it is faster than accumulator architecture i.e less no of registers and using memory instead

- Effiecient implementation for compilers

-clock time per instruction decreases

These are the main advantages.But, they also have disadvantages too.

-Expensive context switching.Due to large no.of registers , we need to save more no. of register values in order to retain the value

-Instructions are longer and for a single operation, it takes more no. of instructions.

-pipeling gets difficult. As pipelining of register file is very difficult and expensive.