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Shrinking Instruction to 48 was the wrong call, and measuring it said so.
The premise was that a sub-cache-line struct touches fewer lines. It does --
but `#packed` aligns the struct to 1, so a 48-byte stride straddles a line
boundary 75% of the time, and the heap base is not line-aligned either. The
old 64-byte packed layout was worse still: 100% straddling, getting none of
the benefit its size implied.
Measured on an i7-9750H (L1d 32K/core, L2 256K, L3 12M), best-of-5, median of
3 interleaved rounds, against the 64-byte packed layout this branch started
from:
scan encode decode
64 packed (was) 1.000x 1.000x 1.000x
48 packed 0.909x 1.040x 1.022x
64 align(64) 1.218x 1.034x 0.806x
Decode is ~19% faster aligned, and that holds at every working set including
ones that fit entirely in L1 -- so it is split-store cost at the store ports,
not cache-line fetches. Decode writes whole Instructions, and the aligned
stores are worth more than the 33% extra bytes they move. A fourth variant --
48 bytes with `#packed` removed -- was measured to rule out the obvious
confound, and tracked 48-packed within 0.5% everywhere, so the win is
alignment and not the loss of packing.
Encode is within a few percent throughout (it is compute-bound; the form scan
dominates), and the pure read traversal is slower, but that is a synthetic
loop and its regression is codegen, not cache -- it is present even at
L1-resident sizes where a standalone struct shows no such penalty.
The Operand and Memory work from the previous commit is what makes this
possible: a 45/48-byte payload now sits inside one line with room to spare,
where the original spent all 64 bytes. The 16-19 spare bytes cost nothing over
a straddling 48-byte struct and give new fields somewhere to land.
All 11 rexcode suites match baseline; arm64 is 73/73 byte-exact against
llvm-mc; arm32's 1680/1680 sweep passes and its encode spot-checks are
unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>