Register versus stack based VMs

[Duck <duck@...>]

Apologies if this isn't strictly a Lua topic. In a recent discussion about 
Dalvik (Google's mobile phone VM [?]), and at various other times in the 
past couple of months, I've heard experts on this list saying that 
register-based VMs are generally considered to give better performance 
these days than stack-based ones.

I can see why "registers better than stack" for most modern CPUs and 
chipsets...

...but would someone like to explain why this holds for bytecode VMs?


PS: Was reminded I wanted to ask this question by perusing LuaNews. I like 
it (and please, don't make it a blog -- the world has enough blogs already 
:-)