RISC (Reduced Instruction-Set Chip) vs. CISC

[Chin Fang]

In article <72969 at eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> jones at acsu.buffalo.edu (terry a jones) writes:
>In article <1991Apr25.033637.15092 at leland.Stanford.EDU> fangchin at elaine54.Stanford.EDU (Chin Fang) writes:
>>I believe many people would enjoy the chance of looking at kernel 
>>disk file sizes.  Below I give three (vm)unix file sizes:        
>>
>>RS6000 supersalar -> multiple instructions per clock, in the case of 
>>                      IBM, the number is 4
>>        1271128 bytes
>>
>>SUN OS 4.1.1 on SPARC -> derivative of Berkeley RISC 
>>
>>        1303014 bytes
>>
>>Ultrix 4.1 on MIPS 5500 (DEC System 5500, Stanford MIPS project decendent)
>>
>>        3375632 bytes
>
>
>	One thing to keep in mind also, is the fact that RISC compiled objects
>are generally larger than their CISC counterparts would be.  Makes good sense
>to me, since there are fewer instructions for the compiler implementer to
>use, his code sequences will generally require more of them.  I don't have
>any hard figures available at the moment.  I'm sure that I could come up
>with some if the need arose.  I recall figures of approx. 30% in some of the
>recent literature that I have read.    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>	Terry

I built emacs 18.57.1 for our RS6000 lately.  After dump (note this 
difference.  I had to dump it to make it fast loading), the size is 

1753552 bytes (Man!!)

Worst, you cann't strip this animal, otherwise it core dumps!

If I get a chance, I will see how big the undumped version can be. Most
likely would not be much smaller, probably about the same as the guy 
below:

On DEC system 5500 (MIPS 5500 CPU), same version the size is 

937984 bytes (Gee!)

This is of course obtained with -s turned on.

I haven't compile emacs on SUN yet, so I can't give yall a good number.

Now on my 386 ESIX box, after mcs -d and strip, together with shared libs
with X support compiled in, the size is 

618496 bytes (Hmmm... not bad)

Kind of interesting.  I am often "surprised" by the "fattening" of executables
on RISC machines.  The 30% increase is not uncommon indeed.  It seems to me
just from what I can recall, MIPS seems to be the worst pig among the RISC
bunch.  The emacs example on RS6000s is an abbration, not a norm. 

Chin Fang
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
fangchin at leland.stanford.edu