Hacker News Reader

1) i386 is not representative of bleeding edge CPU architectures (as mentioned in the article). It would only be icluded for purely academic reasons - which was out of scope.

2) ...

3) In the real world most programs use a single optimization/tuning config for the entire program.

The article aimed to analyze real world programs running on contemporary modern architectures.

View on HN

> i386 is not representative

Would it matter if it had better code density? "Modern" doesn't necessarily mean that it is better in every aspect. For example, there were articles claiming that same application compiled to 64 bits uses more memory than 32-bit version.

It wouldn't matter. I still would not buy an i386, compile my programs in 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit, nor use the i386 ISA as a model when designing a new ISA.

Same thing with 6502, Z80, Vax, etc.

What matters is performance, and i386 code does not give as good performance as x86_64 code or modern RISC code (it doesn't have as many GPRs etc so it can't).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com