Load-store architecture

In computer engineering, a load/store architecture divides instructions into 2 categories: memory access (load and store between memory and registers), and ALU operations (which only occur between registers).

RISC systems such as PowerPC, SPARC, RISC-V, ARM or MIPS use the load/store architecture.

For instance, in a load/store approach both operands and destination for an ADD operation must be in registers. This differs from a register memory architecture (used by CISC designs such as x86) in which one of the operands for the ADD operation may be in memory, while the other is in a register.

The earliest example of a load/store architecture was the CDC 6600. Almost all vector processors (including many GPUs) use the load/store approach.

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