🚀 go-pugleaf

Jan Vorbrueggen <jan@pallas.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de> writes:
>So this loop requires 42 ops, ie, on the Alpha 164 bytes.
>[...]
>[On the transputer] The whole loop thus requires 91 ops and 131 bytes.

Who cares how many bytes it is?  It seems like the obvious tendency for
microprocessors is to go to longer and longer instructions, because with
modern technologies the overhead of fetching and decoding the
instructions is rapidly disappearing.  In 1960 or so it might have made
a big difference whether you could pack the instructions into one byte
instead of four, but I don't see the argument for it today.

Obviously if the length of the instructions were important, the Alpha
could have been designed with variable-length instructions.  So the
evidence is that the cost of 4-byte instructions instead of 1-byte
instructions is quite small, less than the extra complexity of dealing
with variable-length and unaligned instructions.

                                        David desJardins