Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!crdgw1!ge-dab!peora!petsd!joe From: joe@petsd.UUCP (Joe Orost) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Are RISC programs bigger than CISC? (Summary) Message-ID: <1747@petsd.UUCP> Date: 18 Jan 90 01:23:08 GMT Reply-To: joe@petsd.UUCP (Joseph M. Orost) Organization: Concurrent Computer Corporation, Tinton Falls, NJ Lines: 81 In article <1734@petsd.UUCP> I wrote: >I have seen lots of benchmark figures that say that RISC machines >can go real fast, but how about the code size? Is the old notion >that the code on a RISC will be about twice the size of that on a >CISC true? Does anyone have information on this subject, especially >for large programs? Here is a summary of the responses I received. The average seems to be about 40% larger. ----------------------------------------------------- From: psuvax1.cs.psu.edu!schwartz Organization: Penn State University Computer Science Yes they are bigger, but only by a little... in real programs it basically doesn't matter at all, and gets swamped by other factors. For example, GNU emacs on a Sun4 (Sparc) is about 1.6M, and is 1.3M on a Sun3 (68000). (There is a lot of data in there... the code segment is actually bigger on the Sun3 version I'm using, which may mean that one version got optimized and the other didn't, or something.) To take another example, Perl is about 200K (sun3) verses 230K (sun4). That's a small price to pay for 3 or 4 times the performance. -- Scott Schwartz ----------------------------------------------------- From: wimsey.bc.ca!seac!jtc Organization: SEAC Software Engineering, Vancouver, B.C. RISC executables are larger than CISC, but I don't think that the factor of two is accurate. For example emacs on the MIPS R2000 is about 750K while it is about 590K on the intel 80386. -- J.T. Conklin jtc@wimsey.bc.ca, ...!{van-bc, uunet, ubc-cs}!wimsey.bc.ca!jtc ----------------------------------------------------- This has been discussed here, before, but this is typically what we see: 68020 .text Am29000 .text Program (Sun 3/260) MetaWare C ratio ----------------------------------------------------- compress 6600 8792 1.33 dhrystone 1.1 1608 1892 1.17 dhrystone 2.0 2984 3056 1.02 diff 10448 14492 1.39 grep 2640 4288 1.62 nroff 35328 59708 1.69 sipasm 52032 71528 1.37 stanford 9064 9752 1.08 ------------------------------------------------------------ 120704 173508 1.44 -- Tim Olson Advanced Micro Devices (tim@amd.com) ----------------------------------------------------- Gee, I'd heard numbers like 30% larger. There are probably ways to even get this number down a bit... -k ----------------------------------------------------- From: june.cs.washington.edu!noah We found that the Ultrix kernel on our DECStation 3100s is almost three times bigger than on our MicroVAX IIIs. ----------------------------------------------------- regards, joe -- Full-Name: Joseph M. Orost UUCP: rutgers!petsd!joe ARPA: petsd!joe@RUTGERS.EDU, joe@PETSD.CCUR.COM Phone: (201) 758-7284 US Mail: MS 322; Concurrent Computer Corporation; 106 Apple St Tinton Falls, NJ 07724