These are needed as a counterpart for VGPR subregs even though
there are no scalar instructions which can operate 16 bit values.
When we are materializing a constant that is done into an SGPR
and that SGPR may/will be copied into a 16 bit VGPR subreg. Such
copy is illegal. There are also similar problems if a source
operand of a 16 bit VALU instruction is an SGPR. In addition
we need to get a register with a lo16 subregister of an SGPR
RC during selection and this fails as well.
All of that makes me believe we need these subregisters as a
syntactic glue.