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

7.3. Register Stacks

Stacks can be implemented in memory or as a bank of registers. Although a stack composed of processor registers can offer significant performance increases, greater cost and small register counts precluded realistic consideration until RISC designs emerged. The reduction in circuitry required to recognize and execute complex instructions released space on a processor chip for other uses, including more on-chip cache and a larger pool of registers.

7.3.1. SPARC^® Register Windows

Research in computer architecture at the University of California–Berkeley led to the creation of the SPARC^® architecture by Sun^® Microsystems.

Early implementations of the SPARC architecture devoted a significant portion of the processor chip to registers. ...