Itanium® Architecture for Programmers: Understanding 64-Bit Processors and EPIC Principles

Appendix D. Itanium Registers and Their Uses

The nature, number, and uses of CPU registers characterize any given computer architecture and distinguish it from all others. As this book discusses only a carefully chosen subset of Itanium instructions, it does not touch upon every aspect of the architecture. Accordingly, the main text did not seem the appropriate place for charts of all the Itanium registers.

Principles of design for system software, such as operating systems and shared libraries, have been converging toward a model where conventions apply across many different operating systems and programming languages. Standardized assignments of certain processor registers to particular roles make possible, among other things, consistent calling ...