06-26-2017, 04:04 PM (This post was last modified: 06-26-2017, 04:04 PM by tokumei.)
Don't think about just the length of your instructions. Think about what tasks can be done in proportion to the instruction length. If an architecture has instructions that are 2x as long as another but the functionally equivalent program you wrote has half as many lines, then they both have the same space efficiency.
I don't know if any scientific research has been done on the matter, but like aero has said, 8 bit (or even variable width) instructions are very popular here.
I'd say it has to do more with the purpose of the CPU, all my old stuff was wide just because faster execution times in minecraft since I could skip the decoding step, my newer stuff has more practical uses so I trade that speed away for what I think is a more useful size (like for von neuman architecture)