CPU Application Registers? WTF?

ShiverinEskimo

Need to know what the application registers are on a CPU when dicussing Integer registers and floating point registers for a thesis belonging to a friend of mine.

I know what Integer and Floating Point Registers are and what they do but am stuck for an explanation of application registers.

Any ideas?

stevenmu

Just a guess, but it could be just a grouping name used when reffering to registers like the stack pointer and program counter as opposed to the general purpose integer/floating registers ?

theCzar

I'm not an expert, but is it something to do with harvard CPU architecture used in DSP chips? i know they have seperate memory for program and data, which might explain why you need a program register...

but what stevemu said sounds well plausible!

ShiverinEskimo

I know its not a program counter as it already has its program counter seperate to that.

I'm about to look into theCzar's suggestion. Thanks folks.

cerebus

ShiverinEskimo wrote:

I know what Integer and Floating Point Registers are and what they do but am stuck for an explanation of application registers.

Any ideas?

I've seen "application registers" used as a generic term to describe any registers used by application programmers.

Typical examples are things like general purpose data registers containing arithmetic/logical instruction operands and results, instruction pointer registers that track the next instruction to be executed by the CPU, loop counters, pipeline depth tracking, that kind of thing.

Hope that helps.