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0 pointssnvzz4y ago0 comments

Larger caches, as seen in Apple's M1 L1, are one of many tools to deal with bad code density.

RISC-V might, at first glance, look similar to MIPS, but it leads in code density among the 64 bit architectures.

0 comments

> [RISC-V] leads in code density among the 64 bit architectures.

You keep baldly asserting this in virtually all of your very many replies here, with a vague appeal to your own authority, but you haven't shown anything. Given that the submission is precisely an example of bad code density, if you're really here in the service of intellectual curiosity then please show instead of just telling.

brucehoult4y ago

No argument from authority is needed.

Anyone is free to download the disk images for a large body of software such as the same versions of Ubuntu or Fedora, and compare the binary sizes -- using the "text" output from "size" command, not raw disk files as there are also things such as debugging info in there.

Here's an example, using (ironically) the GMP library itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423324

Here we see riscv64 significantly smaller than the other 64 bit ISAs aarch64 (28.1%) and x86_64 (36.5%), and beaten by a smaller margin by 32 bit ARM Thumb2 (-17.0%)

Anyone can check the sizes of bash, perl, emacs ... whatever they want ... themselves, without relying on the word of anyone here.

astrange4y ago

That could be confounded by gcc not enabling -funroll-loops, alignment of branch targets, etc for some architectures.

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