In this segment, we will give very brief details of registers of a RISC system known as MIPS.

MIPS is a register-to-register or load/store architecture and employs three address instructions for data manipulation. It is due to register-register operands that you can have more operands in an instruction of 32 bits because register address are smaller. 

MIPS have 32 addressable registers = 2⁵

⇒ 5 bits register address.

Table given below shows MIPS general purpose registers. 

MIPS register names start with a $. There are two naming conventions:

MIPS register names start with a $. There are two naming conventions:

• By number:

                           $0   $1   $2    ...              $31

• By (mostly) two-letter names like:

                           $a0 - $a3   $t0 - $t7   $s0 - $s7    $gp    $fp    $sp    $ra

Not all of these are general-purpose registers. The subsequent table explains how each general register is treated and actions you can take with each one of the registers. 

Thus all the computers have some registers. However how exactly is instruction execution related to registers?  To explore this idea let's first consider the idea of Micro-operations.