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Remember that it is RISC too, so memory usage would be much higher then x86.

X86 instructions are a bit of a mess, yes, but in ARM you can end up with more of them.

The tricky bit here is actually the SIMD instructions since they can be very long and compiler will often go absolutely bonkers on fairly short code.

Arm and x86 have a similar number of instructions. The tradeoff is that with x86 you end up with more compact code because the instructions are variable length; but on arm the actual decoding is easier so you have more space for i$ (or anything else you want).

That's what I meant

Why?

At a very basic level: RISC instructions take up more space because they do less individually.

That said, very little of most RAM usage is the actual instructions running. It's mostly data.

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