Registers

A register is a location within the processor that is able to store data, much like RAM. Unlike RAM however, accesses to registers are effectively instantaneous, whereas reads from main memory can take hundreds of CPU cycles to return.

Registers can hold any value: addresses (pointers), results from mathematical operations, characters, etc. Some registers are reserved however, meaning they have a special purpose and are not "general purpose registers" (GPRs). On x86, the only 2 reserved registers are rip and rsp which hold the address of the next instruction to execute and the address of the stack respectively.

On x86, the same register can have different sized accesses for backwards compatability. For example, the rax register is the full 64-bit register, eax is the low 32 bits of rax, ax is the low 16 bits, al is the low 8 bits, and ah is the high 8 bits of ax (bits 8-16 of rax).