Editing Register renaming (section)

{{Short description|Technique that abstracts logical registers from physical registers}}
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In [[computer architecture]], '''register renaming''' is a technique that abstracts logical [[processor register|register]]s from physical registers.
Every logical register has a set of physical registers associated with it.
When a [[machine language]] instruction refers to a particular logical register, the processor transposes this name to one specific physical register on the fly.
The physical registers are opaque and cannot be referenced directly but only via the canonical names.

This technique is used to eliminate false [[Data dependency|data dependencies]] arising from the reuse of registers by successive [[Instruction (computer science)|instructions]] that do not have any real data dependencies between them.
The elimination of these false data dependencies reveals more  [[instruction-level parallelism]] in an instruction stream, which can be exploited by various and complementary techniques such as [[superscalar]] and [[out-of-order execution]] for better [[Computer performance|performance]].