🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1734@petsd.UUCP> I wrote:
>I have seen lots of benchmark figures that say that RISC machines
>can go real fast, but how about the code size?  Is the old notion
>that the code on a RISC will be about twice the size of that on a
>CISC true?  Does anyone have information on this subject, especially
>for large programs?

Here is a summary of the responses I received.  The average seems to
be about 40% larger.
-----------------------------------------------------
From: psuvax1.cs.psu.edu!schwartz
Organization: Penn State University Computer Science

Yes they are bigger, but only by a little... in real programs it
basically doesn't matter at all, and gets swamped by other factors.
For example, GNU emacs on a Sun4 (Sparc) is about 1.6M, and is 1.3M on
a Sun3 (68000).  (There is a lot of data in there... the code segment
is actually bigger on the Sun3 version I'm using, which may mean that
one version got optimized and the other didn't, or something.)  To take
another example, Perl is about 200K (sun3) verses 230K (sun4).  That's
a small price to pay for 3 or 4 times the performance.
-- 
Scott Schwartz
-----------------------------------------------------
From: wimsey.bc.ca!seac!jtc
Organization: SEAC Software Engineering, Vancouver, B.C.

RISC executables are larger than CISC, but I don't think that the
factor of two is accurate.  For example emacs on the MIPS R2000 is
about 750K while it is about 590K on the intel 80386.

-- 
J.T. Conklin
    jtc@wimsey.bc.ca, ...!{van-bc, uunet, ubc-cs}!wimsey.bc.ca!jtc
-----------------------------------------------------

This has been discussed here, before, but this is typically what we
see: 


		68020 .text	Am29000 .text
Program		(Sun 3/260)	MetaWare C	ratio
-----------------------------------------------------
compress	    6600	    8792	1.33
dhrystone 1.1	    1608	    1892	1.17
dhrystone 2.0	    2984	    3056	1.02
diff		   10448	   14492	1.39
grep		    2640	    4288	1.62
nroff		   35328	   59708	1.69
sipasm		   52032	   71528	1.37
stanford	    9064	    9752	1.08
------------------------------------------------------------
		  120704	  173508	1.44

	-- Tim Olson
	Advanced Micro Devices
	(tim@amd.com)
-----------------------------------------------------

	Gee, I'd heard numbers like 30% larger.  There are probably ways
to even get this number down a bit...

					-k
-----------------------------------------------------
From: june.cs.washington.edu!noah

We found that the Ultrix kernel on our DECStation 3100s is almost three
times bigger than on our MicroVAX IIIs.
-----------------------------------------------------

				regards,
				joe

--

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