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The RISC-V designers implemented a compressed instruction extension (the most common instructions can be represented in half the size), and found a performance

by cesarb 11y ago

The RISC-V designers implemented a compressed instruction extension (the most common instructions can be represented in half the size), and found a performance gain. So yes, instruction size matters. From the 1.9 draft of the RISC-V compressed instructions specification: "Waterman shows that RVC fetches 25%-30% fewer instruction bits, which reduces instruction cache misses by 20%-25%, or roughly the same performance impact as doubling the instruction cache size." Larger caches are slower, so just doubling the cache size doesn't necessarily recover the performance lost by larger instructions.

userbinator 11y ago
implemented a compressed instruction extension (the most common instructions can be represented in half the size), and found a performance gain. ...which makes me wonder why they didn't just make that the standard. x86 is dense and that's partly where its performance comes from.
- cesarb 11y ago
  They planned for it since the beginning. While the base RISC-V encoding uses only 32-bit instructions, it's actually a variable-length encoding, where the least significant bits define the instruction length. If the least significant bits are 00, 01, or 10, it's a 16-bit instruction. The base RISC-V was designed to be minimal; for instance, hardware multiply and divide is the M extension. I expect that, once the C (compressed instructions) extension is standardized, most high-performance implementations will include it, since the extra area cost should be minimal compared to the out-of-order machinery; small in-order implementations where area is at a premium and performance is not so important will continue to use only the base 32-bit instructions. There's even a variant, RV32E, which omits half the registers to make the core even smaller.
- _chris_ 11y ago
  x86 is NOT dense - it averages nearly 4 bytes per instruction on workloads such as SPEC. And not everybody wants to go through the design effort to support variable-length encoding (it's non-trivial and can potentially increase pipeline latency to support it). It very well could become a de facto RISC-V standard, but that remains to be seen.
- __s 11y ago
  In the paper they discuss how x86 isn't even dense, & barely competes with ARM's constant width instructions

by cesarb 11y ago

userbinator 11y ago

implemented a compressed instruction extension (the most common instructions can be represented in half the size), and found a performance gain. ...which makes me wonder why they didn't just make that the standard. x86 is dense and that's partly where its performance comes from.

cesarb 11y ago
They planned for it since the beginning. While the base RISC-V encoding uses only 32-bit instructions, it's actually a variable-length encoding, where the least significant bits define the instruction length. If the least significant bits are 00, 01, or 10, it's a 16-bit instruction. The base RISC-V was designed to be minimal; for instance, hardware multiply and divide is the M extension. I expect that, once the C (compressed instructions) extension is standardized, most high-performance implementations will include it, since the extra area cost should be minimal compared to the out-of-order machinery; small in-order implementations where area is at a premium and performance is not so important will continue to use only the base 32-bit instructions. There's even a variant, RV32E, which omits half the registers to make the core even smaller.
_chris_ 11y ago
x86 is NOT dense - it averages nearly 4 bytes per instruction on workloads such as SPEC. And not everybody wants to go through the design effort to support variable-length encoding (it's non-trivial and can potentially increase pipeline latency to support it). It very well could become a de facto RISC-V standard, but that remains to be seen.
__s 11y ago
In the paper they discuss how x86 isn't even dense, & barely competes with ARM's constant width instructions