Well, to be fair, LEA does allow for more compact encoding than RISC add/shift/add if the operations actually fit the template. But it's not enough to overcome

Well, to be fair, LEA does allow for more compact encoding than RISC add/shift/add if the operations actually fit the template. But it's not enough to overcome the waste elsewhere. Most of the benefit of LEA is that it's three-address rather than two and that it doesn't clobber the flags, but those are solutions to problems that RISC doesn't have in the first place. Edit: Ah well, beaten by your edit. :)