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by marcosdumay 3300 days ago
Increasing the register count spends opcodes. That leads to less available instructions, or at a minimum constraints opcode optimization.
1 comments

As we saw with AMD64, x86 is a variable length ISA, up to 15 bytes long, allowing for quiet a flexible (and complex) encoding. With a fixed width RISC, yeah registers are going to eat into opcode space. And in both cases, register renaming will allow more renamed (180) registers than architectural registers.

BTW, renamed != ROB. I got that wrong above.

In varying length architectures it will constrain opcode optimization, making your binaries larger (requiring more cache). It's not as big a problem as in fixed length instruction machines, but adding named registers is never free.