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From: tim@nucleus.amd.com (Tim Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Are RISC programs bigger than CISC?
Message-ID: <28636@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 5 Jan 90 15:16:40 GMT
References: <1734@petsd.UUCP>
Sender: news@amdcad.AMD.COM
Reply-To: tim@amd.com (Tim Olson)
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Austin, Texas
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In article <1734@petsd.UUCP> joe@petsd.UUCP (Joseph M. Orost) writes:
| 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?

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)