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by hajile 677 days ago
https://oscarlab.github.io/papers/instrpop-systor19.pdf

ARM64 instructions are 4 bytes. x86 instructions in real-world code average 4.25 bytes. ARM64 gets closer to x86 code size as it adds new instructions to replace common instruction sequences.

RISC-V has 2-byte and 4-byte instructions and averages very close to 3-bytes. Despite this, the original compressed code was only around 15% more dense than x86. The addition of the B (bitwise) extensions and Zcb have increased that advantage by quite a lot. As other extensions get added, I'd expect to see this lead increase over time.