Answer:

To free up a general purpose register for some other use.

(You might also push the register's contents on the run-time stack, and later pop it back into the register.)

Floating Point Load Immediate

There is a floating point load immediate pseudoinstruction. This loads a floating point register with a constant value that is specified in the instruction.

li.s   fd,val     # load register $fd with val
                  # (pseudoinstruction)

Here is a code snippet showing this:

li.s    $f1,1.0             # $f1 = constant 1.0
li.s    $f2,2.0             # $f2 = constant 2.0
li.s    $f10,1.0e-5         # $f10 = 0.00001

QUESTION 6:

(Take a guess: ) Could the first instruction be written as li.s $f1,1 ?