One may expect that partitioning increases the number of executed cycles because it constrains the number of ports per RF. It is shown that these performance losses are small; e.g., partitioning a RF with 24 registers and four read and four write ports into four RFs with 6~registers and one read and one write port gives a performance loss of only 5.8\%.
Partitioned RFs consume less area than monolithic RFs with the same
number of ports and registers. Experiments indicate that, if the area
saved by partitioning is spent on extra registers, partitioning does,
on average, not reduce the performance; it may even result in a small
performance gain.