Topic summary
Stack pointer
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Stack register.
Stack engine
Simpler processors store the stack pointer in a regular hardware register and use the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) to manipulate its value. In processors with instructions that push items onto the stack and pop items from the stack, those instructions are either executed with multiple hardwired CPU cycles or microinstructions or are translated into multiple micro-ops, to separately add/subtract the stack pointer, and perform the load/store in memory.