Re: Early-2014 Macbook Air and Linux Mint Cinnamon
John Ames <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | comp.sys.mac.vintage,comp.os.linux.misc |
|---|---|
| Organization | A place where nothing fits quite right |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:07:47 +0200 "Carlos E. R." <[email protected]> wrote: > An accumulator is not a register. It is different, you can do > operations on it. Maybe on current processors the difference is not > that big. The specifics depend on the architecture in question, but generally speaking "accumulator" is used for a general-purpose register in an architecture where there are other, non-general-purpose ones - e.g. the 6502, which has A (which most of the ALU instructions work on) plus the X and Y registers, which are index registers but can also be used as counters or spare registers for intermediate values in a pinch. Other architectures take a different approach, and treat most or all registers as general-purpose - e.g. the PDP-11, and any RISC design I've ever heard of. Some split the difference, with a set of general- purpose registers plus a set of specialized ones (the 68k, which has eight GPRs and eight address registers.) And then there's the 8086, in which all registers are *sorta* general- purpose, except they also all have special functions the others don't, except when you can override them, but sometimes you can't... :/