Comment by camel-cdr

Ok, let's test it then!

For testing, I use a custom qemu plugin to calculate the dynamic instruction count, dynamic uop count, and dynamic instruction size. Every instruction with multiple register writebacks was counted as one uop per writeback, and to make the results more comparable, SIMD was disabled.

I used this setup to run self-compiling single-file versions of chibicc (assembling) and tinycc (generating object file), which are small C compilers of 9K and 24K LOC respectively. Both compilers were cross-compiled using clang-22 and were benchmarked cross-compiling themselves to x86.

Let's look at the impact of -ftrapv first. In chibicc O3/O2/Os the dynamic upos increased due to -ftrapv for RISC-V by 5.3%/5.1%/6.7%, and for ARM by 5.1%/5.0%/6.4%. Interestingly, in tinycc it only increased for RISC-V by 1.6%/1.0%/1.0%, while ARM increased slightly more with 1.6%/2.0%/1.3%.

In terms of dynamic instruction count, ARM needed to execute 6%/15% fewer instructions than RISC-V for chibicc/tinycc. Looking at the uops, RISC-V needs to execute 6% more uops in tinycc, but ARM needs to execute 0.5% more uops with chibicc. The dynamic instruction size, which estimates the pressure on icache and fetch bandwidth, was 24%/10% lower in RISC-V for chibicc/tinycc.

Note that this did not model any instruction fusion in RISC-V and only treated incrementing loads and load pairs as multiple uops (to mirror Apple Silicon).

If the only fusion pair you implement is adjacent compressed sp relative stores, then RISC-V ends up with a lower uop count for both programs. They are trivial to implement because you can just interpret the two adjacent 16-bit instructions as a single 32-bit instruction, and compilers always generate them next to each other and in sorted order in function prolog code. You can do this directly in your RVC expander; it only adds minimal additional delay (zero with a trick), which is constant regardless of decode width.

Raw data:

    chibicc/clang-O3-armv9:       insns: 419886184    uops:  450136257    bytes: 1679544736
    chibicc/clang-O3-armv9-trap:  insns: 450205913    uops:  474206409    bytes: 1800823652
    chibicc/clang-O3-rva23:       insns: 449328186    uops:  449328186    bytes: 1288202666
    chibicc/clang-O3-rva23-trap:  insns: 474623648    uops:  474623648    bytes: 1375991094
    chibicc/clang-O2-armv9:       insns: 421810039    uops:  451501004    bytes: 1687240156
    chibicc/clang-O2-armv9-trap:  insns: 451642152    uops:  475084965    bytes: 1806568608
    chibicc/clang-O2-rva23:       insns: 449625081    uops:  449625081    bytes: 1286452180
    chibicc/clang-O2-rva23-trap:  insns: 473682134    uops:  473682134    bytes: 1369720036
    chibicc/clang-Os-armv9:       insns: 457841653    uops:  489902437    bytes: 1831366612
    chibicc/clang-Os-armv9-trap:  insns: 497189616    uops:  523323893    bytes: 1988758464
    chibicc/clang-Os-rva23:       insns: 486216287    uops:  486216287    bytes: 1363135906
    chibicc/clang-Os-rva23-trap:  insns: 520889604    uops:  520889604    bytes: 1473263784


    tinycc/clang-O3-armv9:        insns: 115189179    uops:  126358884    bytes: 460756716
    tinycc/clang-O3-armv9-trap:   insns: 117139555    uops:  128361973    bytes: 468558220
    tinycc/clang-O3-rva23:        insns: 137035509    uops:  137035509    bytes: 427878586
    tinycc/clang-O3-rva23-trap:   insns: 139248009    uops:  139248009    bytes: 436548988
    tinycc/clang-O2-armv9:        insns: 115184314    uops:  126568360    bytes: 460737256
    tinycc/clang-O2-armv9-trap:   insns: 117651772    uops:  129195276    bytes: 470607088
    tinycc/clang-O2-rva23:        insns: 137362294    uops:  137362294    bytes: 420468990
    tinycc/clang-O2-rva23-trap:   insns: 138649335    uops:  138649335    bytes: 428680948
    tinycc/clang-Os-armv9:        insns: 130661270    uops:  144718253    bytes: 522645080
    tinycc/clang-Os-armv9-trap:   insns: 132574148    uops:  146565708    bytes: 530296592
    tinycc/clang-Os-rva23:        insns: 152798316    uops:  152798316    bytes: 452181732
    tinycc/clang-Os-rva23-trap:   insns: 154232874    uops:  154232874    bytes: 458257882