3 ms·
I thought they were the same instructions, just a more compact representation (that has a subset of functionality)?
by jeff-davis 6y ago
I thought they were the same instructions, just a more compact representation (that has a subset of functionality)?
- fwsgonzo 6y agoThey are, but there are some drawbacks: 32-bit instructions can cross page-boundries and 16-bit instructions makes the length of the instruction dependent on a bit-pattern instead of a fixed-width.
- jabl 6y agoYes, they should have specified that even with the C extension, 32-bit instructions are 32-bit aligned. That would have slightly worsened density as you'd need a 16-bit nop to pad an uneven number of 16-bit instructions, but would have simplified decoding.