[TChris]

It's an interesting concept. I remember mainframes that had registers and no stack. But I think we'll continue to use architectures with both features for the foreseeable future. Stacks frames are great for passing arguments and containing local variables in structured programs, but good usage of registers can make a program fly.

AFAIK, Curren't processors don't have a hardware stack. They just have registers. A "stack frame" is only a memory construct, not a hardware feature.

[HAL9000]

You're probably right. I only browsed the slides, and missed the full explanation of the stack hardware.

The presentation seemed to be based on the assumption that the registers would be used exclusively in read/modify/write cycles. I guess that's especially true for x86 processors with relatively small number of registers. But in processors with a large register set, a good compiler or assembly language program can optimize the code to minimize reads/writes to external memory.