Question

Why does sethi only load the high 22 bits of a register? It would be more useful if sethi loaded all 32 bits of a register. What is the problem with having sethi load all 32 bits?

Answer 1

This might help: http://www.iecc.com/linker/linker07.html

Answer 2

To load all 32 bits, you need to have 32 bits of data. Where is it coming from? What is the binary format of a sethi instruction?

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~maccabe/classes/341/labman/node9.html might be of some help, see 9.3.2.