The Art of Picking Intel Registers
When the engineers at Intel designed the original 8086 processor, they had a special purpose in mind for each register. As they designed the instruction set, they created many optimizations and special instructions based on the function they expected each register to perform. Using registers according to Intel’s original plan allows the code to take full advantage of these optimizations. Unfortunately, this seems to be a lost art. Few coders are aware of Intel’s overall design, and most compilers are too the simplistic or focused on execution speed to use the registers properly. Understanding how the registers and instruction set fit together, however, is an important step on the road to effortless size-coding.