Comparing PIE executables is a bit of an anachronism. They did not really exist when x86-64 was introduced. Position-dependent executables are more compact on i

Comparing PIE executables is a bit of an anachronism. They did not really exist when x86-64 was introduced. Position-dependent executables are more compact on i386 because its lack of PC-relative addressing (the %rip stuff on x86-64) does not matter. That being said, the larger register set, the register-based calling convention, SSE2 for floating point math, PC-relative addressing (important for shared objects) together usually compensate the cost of wider pointers. Unless your workload happens to be pointer-heavy and fit into slightly less than 4 GiB of address space.