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x86-64 wastes enough of its address space that arm64 is typically smaller in practice. The RISC-V folks pointed this out a decade ago - geomean across their SPEC suite, x86 is 7.3% larger binary size than arm64.

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/%7Ekrste/papers/EECS-2016-1...

So there’s another small factor leaning against x86 - inferior code density means they get less out of their icache than ARM64 due to their ISA design (legacy cruft). And ARM64 often has larger icaches anyway - M1 is 6x the icache of zen4 iirc, and they get more out of it with better code density.

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