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by avianes 1331 days ago
> Separate FP registers - This looks to have started when FPUs were optional and/or physically separate, but that's no longer the case.

Using a separate register set for FP is not just about making floats optional. It also allows to better isolate the float and int units and to build a more efficient micro-architecture.

For example: using a single physical register bank for floats and integers would be expensive (as the size of the register bank grows quadratically with the number of read/write ports), therefore using separate physical register bank for float and integer is more efficient.