[jasonwatkinspdx]

So, with RISC-V the design pretty deliberately enables a combination of compressed instructions and macro op fusion.

The compressed instructions are quite lightweight. It's generally an assembly level thing, and the decoder on the cpu side is apparently ~400 gates.

The compressed instructions are indeed a 16 bit wide thing, but fixing some of the flaws in Thumb. Generally they have more implicit operands or operands range over a subset of registers to fit in 16 bits.

But the hat trick is these two dovetail into each other, such that a sequence of compressed instructions can decompress into a fuse-able pair/tuple, which then decodes into a single internal micro op. This creates a way to handle common idioms and special cases without introducing an ever growing number of instructions. Or at least that's the basic claim by the RISC-V folks. I think they've done enough homework on this to not be trivially wrong, so it'll be interesting to see how things go.