Neither side is correct IMO. Qualcomm wants 32-bit only instructions, but that leaves out many use cases that require longer instructions. On the flip side, a

Neither side is correct IMO. Qualcomm wants 32-bit only instructions, but that leaves out many use cases that require longer instructions. On the flip side, a 48-bit instruction takes FIVE bits just to specify the length which is a massive amount of overhead. I think 64-bit instructions which contain between 1 and 4 instructions (not VLIW as no ILP is specified) would be a better solution offering more compressed instructions and much lower length encoding overhead for 48 and 64-bit instructions while still leaving a potential opening for very long instructions composed of several 64-bit groups. This beats out the Qualcomm proposal in terms of cache, code density, fusion, jumping, and many more without losing any of the benefits of compressed instructions (in fact, it increases the compression benefits).