Register renaming
Overview
Computer architecture
In computer science and engineering, computer architecture is the practical art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals and the formal modelling of those systems....
, register renaming refers to a technique used to avoid unnecessary serialization of program operations imposed by the reuse of registers
Processor register
In computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available as part of a CPU or other digital processor. Such registers are addressed by mechanisms other than main memory and can be accessed more quickly...
by those operations.
Programs are composed of instructions which operate on values. The instructions must name these values in order to distinguish them from one another. A typical instruction might say, add X and Y and put the result in Z. In this instruction, X, Y, and Z are the names of storage locations.
In order to have a compact instruction encoding, most processor instruction sets have a small set of special locations which can be directly named.
