Why did they use numbers for register names in x86-64?
09:47 07 Oct 2012

AFAIK x86-64 adds a number of general purpose registers to those derived from Intel x86 (rax, rcx, etc), called r8-r15.

Why did they name the new registers like this? Why not just follow existing naming convention and call them like rfx, rgx ... ?

assembly x86-64 cpu-registers instruction-set