Many architectures allow addressing parts of a register independently. Be it the infamous high/low 8 bit registers of X86, the 32/64bit addressing modes of X86-64 and AArch64 or GPUs with wide loads and stores where with computation on sub register lanes.
LLVM recently gained support to track liveness on subregister granularity. In combination with improved heuristics for register classes of varying sizes the average register count decreased for 20% for GPU shader programs.
This talk gives an introduction to typical situations benefiting from sub register liveness modeling. It shows how a target architecture developer can model them and explains the register allocation techniques employed by llvm.
