In computer engineering, a load–store architecture (or a register–register architecture) is an instruction set architecture that divides instructions into two categories: memory access (load and store between memory and registers) and ALU operations (which only occur between registers).^{[1]: 9–12}

Some RISC architectures such as PowerPC, SPARC, RISC-V, ARM, and MIPS are load–store architectures.^{[1]: 9–12}

For instance, in a load–store approach both operands and destination for an ADD operation must be in registers. This differs from a register–memory architecture (for example, a CISC instruction set architecture such as x86) in which one of the operands for the ADD operation may be in memory, while the other is in a register.^{[1]: 9–12}

The earliest example of a load–store architecture was the CDC 6600.^{[1]: 54–56} Almost all vector processors (including many GPUs^{[2][better source needed]}) use the load–store approach.^[3]

• Load–store unit
• Register–memory architecture