Agner`s CPU blog

register file read port counts are on the higher end... 2 ports per AGU (address generating unit), plus 4 ports per ALU (3 operands + 1 mask) and 4 ports per vector unit (3 operands + 1 mask)... This also affects the size of the input dependency tracking mechanism (and, I guess, the register renamer).

I have limited the number of output registers to one in order to simplify dependency tracking and register renaming, following our previous discussion. This means no flags register, no conventional add-with-carry instruction, and no single-instruction stack POP.

Current x86 processors have at least the same number of register inputs, plus segment register, and at least two register write ports.

My idea is to combine the best from RISC and CISC. The weakness of CISC is that the decoding is complicated, and it is difficult to decode multiple instructions in one clock cycle. They are caching decoded instructions to deal with this, which is a waste of silicon space. ForwardCom deals with this by making decoding simple. The weakness of RISC is that you need more instructions to do the same. For example, RISC-V needs a long sequence of instructions just to calculate the address of a memory operand. If you can do the same with a single instruction, you get a much higher overall throughput.

Why do you think register read ports are so expensive?