Thumb2 was good. The main issue with AArch64 is that they dropped the variable instruction length. As such all instructions are huge and this significantly slow

Thumb2 was good. The main issue with AArch64 is that they dropped the variable instruction length. As such all instructions are huge and this significantly slows down code, especially after a mispredicted branch. I'm observing on average a 20% performance loss from thumb2 to aarch64 on the exact same CPU and same kernel, just switching executables, an d 40% larger code or so. Also something to consider, an A53 can only read 64 bits per cycle from the cache, i.e. just two instructions. That doesn't even allow it to fetch a bit more and start to decode in advance.