Load Immediate

The ori instruction, used as above, copies a bit pattern from the instruction into the destination register. (Recall that the 16 bit immediate operand is zero-extended into 32 bits.) This operation is usually called a load immediate operation — it loads a register with a value that is immediately available (without going to memory).

You might wish that there were a mnemonic for "load immediate". There is. The extended assembler includes the li mnemonic. The assembler translates this pseudoinstruction into the appropriate basic instruction.

li   d,value        #  load register $d with the 
                    #  positive or negative integer
                    #  "value".  Value may be a 
                    #  16 or a 32-bit integer. 
                    #  (pseudoinstruction)