16-bit vs. 32-bit instructions for pipelined microprocessors
John Bunda, Don Fussell, W.C. Athas, Roy M. Jenevein · 1993
In any stored-program computer system, information is constantly transferred between the memory and the instruction processor. Machine instructions are a major portion of this traffic. Since transfer bandwidth is a limited resource, inefficiency in the encoding of instruction information (low code density) can have definite hardware and performance costs.