One design element used in all of the Berkeley-derived designs is the concept of register windows, a technique used to speed up procedure calls significantly. The idea is to use a large set of registers as a stack, loading local data into a set of registers during a call, and marking them "dead" when the procedure returns. Values being returned from the routines would be placed in the "global page", the top eight registers in the SPARC (for instance). The competing early RISC design from Stanford University, the Stanford MIPS, also looked at this concept but decided that improved compilers could make more efficient use of general purpose registers than a hard-wired window.