Page "Accumulator (computing)" Paragraph 20

Early 4-bit and 8-bit microprocessors such as the 4004, 8008 and numerous others, typically had single accumulators.

The 8051 microcontroller has two, a primary accumulator and a secondary accumulator, where the second is used by instructions only when multiplying ( MUL AB ) or dividing ( DIV AB ); the former splits the 16-bit result between the two 8-bit accumulators, whereas the latter stores the quotient on the primary accumulator A and the remainder in the secondary accumulator B.

As a direct descendent of the 8008, the 8080, and the 8086, the modern ubiquitous Intel x86 processors still uses the primary accumulator EAX and the secondary accumulator EDX for multiplication and division of large numbers.

For instance, MUL ECX will multiply the 32-bit registers ECX and EAX and split the 64-bit result between EAX and EDX.

However, MUL and DIV are special cases, other arithmetic-logical instructions ( ADD, SUB, CMP, AND, OR, XOR, TEST ) may specify any of the eight registers EAX, ECX, EDX, EBX, ESP, EBP, ESI, EDI as the accumulator ( i. e. left operand and destination ); x86 is thus a fairly general register architecture, despite being based on an accumulator model.

The 64-bit extension of x86, x86-64, has been further generalized to 14 instead of 6 general registers.