Assembly: Why are we bothering with registers?

Question

I have a basic question about assembly.

Why do we bother doing arithmetic operations only on registers if they can work on memory as well?

For example both of the following cause (essentially) the same value to be calculated as an answer:

Snippet 1

.data
    var dd 00000400h

.code

    Start:
        add var,0000000Bh
        mov eax,var
        ;breakpoint: var = 00000B04
    End Start

Snippet 2

.code

    Start:
        mov eax,00000400h
        add eax,0000000bh
        ;breakpoint: eax = 0000040B
    End Start

From what I can see most texts and tutorials do arithmetic operations mostly on registers. Is it just faster to work with registers?

Edit: That was fast :)

A few great answers were given; best answer was chosen based on the first good answer.

Answer 1

If you look at computer architectures, you find a series of levels of memory. Those that are close to the CPU are the fast, expensive (per a bit), and therefore small, while at the other end you have big, slow and cheap memory devices. In a modern computer, these are typically something like:

 CPU registers (slightly complicated, but in the order of 1KB per a core - there
                are different types of registers. You might have 16 64 bit
                general purpose registers plus a bunch of registers for special
                purposes)
 L1 cache (64KB per core)
 L2 cache (256KB per core)
 L3 cache (8MB)
 Main memory (8GB)
 HDD (1TB)
 The internet (big)

Over time, more and more levels of cache have been added - I can remember a time when CPUs didn't have any onboard caches, and I'm not even old! These days, HDDs come with onboard caches, and the internet is cached in any number of places: in memory, on the HDD, and maybe on caching proxy servers.

There is a dramatic (often orders of magnitude) decrease in bandwidth and increase in latency in each step away from the CPU. For example, a HDD might be able to be read at 100MB/s with a latency of 5ms (these numbers may not be exactly correct), while your main memory can read at 6.4GB/s with a latency of 9ns (six orders of magnitude!). Latency is a very important factor, as you don't want to keep the CPU waiting any longer than it has to (this is especially true for architectures with deep pipelines, but that's a discussion for another day).

The idea is that you will often be reusing the same data over and over again, so it makes sense to put it in a small fast cache for subsequent operations. This is referred to as temporal locality. Another important principle of locality is spatial locality, which says that memory locations near each other will likely be read at about the same time. It is for this reason that reading from RAM will cause a much larger block of RAM to be read and put into on-CPU cache. If it wasn't for these principles of locality, then any location in memory would have an equally likely chance of being read at any one time, so there would be no way to predict what will be accessed next, and all the levels of cache in the world will not improve speed. You might as well just use a hard drive, but I'm sure you know what it's like to have the computer come to a grinding halt when paging (which is basically using the HDD as an extension to RAM). It is conceptually possible to have no memory except for a hard drive (and many small devices have a single memory), but this would be painfully slow compared to what we're familiar with.

One other advantage of having registers (and only a small number of registers) is that it lets you have shorter instructions. If you have instructions that contain two (or more) 64 bit addresses, you are going to have some long instructions!

Answer 2

Registers are much faster and also the operations that you can perform directly on memory are far more limited.