One of the few instructions that can use the high registers (r8-r14) is
the add instruction, which can add any two registers, as long as one of
them is also used as the destination register.
By using this form of add , we can add buf_base (in a high register) to
the offset within the buffer (in a low register), to get the desired
pointer value (buf_ptr) which we want to access.
This saves one cycle by eliminating the need to move buf_base to a low
register first.
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