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Huh? x86/x86_64 has segmented registers that can be used as 64 bit (rax), 32 bit (eax), 16 bit (ax), and the upper and lower 8 bits of the latter (ah,al). Not to mention I/O ports which use 16 bit addresses and allow for 8, 16, and 32 bit accesses, and various internal processor data structures that have 8 or 16 bit wide fields, among other uses.


Performing operations using the segmented registers is no faster than using the 32-bit analogues. Benchmark an add of eax,edx vs Al,dl in a loop.




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